I know it can be done. It is just a failing on my part to get the slinky to perform.
My belief, with no experiments to back it up, and without even looking at the video, is that a slinky has a natural run and rise that it will follow. If your stairs match that, your slinky will walk down the stairs.
If not, you need better stairs. 
My mother in law gave me a fake Rolex for Christmas one year–actually it was a week before I married her daughter, quite unannounced. I don’t think she much liked me at the time and expected me to be about as reliable as her gift–she would have been surprised to know I’ve been to the Rolex factory. I was cool about it even though I pegged it as a fake immediately, wore it for the day then put it in the drawer that evening when the strap broke. We get along great these days. Neither of us mentions the watch.
I liked that book also. Here is an article by the author on ‘quality fade’.
http://www.forbes.com/2007/07/26/china-manufacturing-quality-ent-manage-cx_kw_0726whartonchina.html
My dad used to be partner in a plastics company. Plastics is an extremely expensive business. You get what you pay for.
I popped into a chain clothing store with my BFF one day and bought what looked like a pair of khaki capris. One wash and they were in shreds. I’ve also bought a package of name brand underwear at the dollar store, only to find that two of the three pair were unfit to wear right out of the package and the third was sewn whipperjawed.
Sometimes, a bargain is no bargain at all.
In the southern hemisphere, a slinky will go up the stairs.
I found some great looking clothes online, and ordered them. Some tops, some skirts, a couple of dresses (I almost never wear pants/slacks/trousers). All of them pilled horribly after one wash. Grrrr. The colors were good, the styles were good, and if those clothes hadn’t developed pills, I would have ordered more from the same company. I still get the catalogs, and I flip through them, and I still like the styles. But what’s the point of buying something that I won’t be happy to use?
“Whipperjawed”?
I refer to these types of products as “props” - as in stage props. They are meant to look enough like the actual item to fool the audience, but not actually function as the item.
I’m assuming it means crooked. I couldn’t find any hits for whipperjawed except this thread but here’s the word detective on whopperjawed.
Pepsi.
There’s several hits. You just have to get Google to search for what you want, instead of what it thinks you want (“whopperjawed”).
From the urban dictionary: “West Virginia slang for “all screwed up,” “out of whack,” etc.”
That’s a great word. What’s interesting is how, evidently, people will actually buy this stuff more than once. The prop party prizes are all over town and have been for years. Why do people bother?
It goes beyond just poor quality. There is a range of quality in any product and you generally get what you pay for. But in the last few years, it seems like if you buy the absolute cheapest of anything, it’s not just poor quality, it plain doesn’t work.
Another example is candy. You can buy “prop chocolate” now that is brown like chocolate, but tastes like a crayon. There’s also what I can only describe as novelty gummy candy from China. It looks like candy, but tastes like chewing on mattress foam.
I refuse to buy any food products from China. Not a month goes by without some story about adulterated products the Chinese are foisting onto the market because cadmium was cheaper than sugar or some such evilness.
A bag of what looked like tennis balls at the dollar store. For the dogs.
Toss, thud, roll.
Toss, thud, roll.
No bounce. The dogs delighted themselves by chewing on them. The yellow fuzz just sort of fell off and I had gobs of yellow fuzz gleaming brightly all over the yard. I prayed that none of the toxic fuzz had been swallowed.
I had a similar experience as **Fear Itself **with the dollar store bungee cords. Non-elastic bungee cords. They stretched out and stayed that length. The hooks broke off. too.
I now know to stay out of dollar stores.
I bought a picture of my family at Walmart. That is, I thought it was my family–it looks like my family.
The frame containing the picture, however, is not so bad.
Hey, I have one of those flashlights. It’s black with a yellow head? Still works after 20 or 30 years.
Back when I was a kid my mum bought some plastic pegs because they were about three times cheaper than wooden ones. They all fell to pieces within weeks so she carried on buying wooden ones, as did I when I left home. It took me about forty years to realise that you can get decent pegs made out of plastic and they’re more reliable than wooden ones
When I was a beekeeper, my wife bought me a “bee suit” from an eBay store for $12.
This is what happened.