I’d seen this thread a couple weeks ago but wondered what the heck it was about.
This morning at the 7-11 there was a bucket of them for sale next to the cash register. $2.97 each. Hooray for China.
Yeah, I was in a grocery store last week that had a ton of them for 2.99, but kept in the glass case where they normally keep very small but fairly expensive stuff (flash drives, for example.)
These showed up on my radar about six months ago because I have one of those 3D printers, and suddenly every third submission to the various “printable thing” sites was one of these fidget spinners.
It does seem to be the yo-yo/Rubik’s cube/trapper keeper/slime of the current generation of schoolkids; I’m sure it’ll be replaced by something else in a few years.
I’ve made a few for folks – the actual bearing wheel is a standard skateboard bearing and snaps in; it’s not printed. They’re actually fairly nice demos for the 3D printer because you can print one in an hour or so even on a slow deposition machine, and folks can take it home with them. It’s not super cost-efficient (the bearings are about .75 each, and it takes four of them plus maybe a .50 worth of filament), but then nothing 3D printed is today.
As a printed device, they’re an interesting lesson in how poor even the average educated person is at mechanical engineering, particularly concepts like “tolerances.” My machine is properly calibrated, and yet it still took me 4-5 of these models before I found one that the bearing hole wasn’t exactly the size of the bearing ring, hence requiring an hour of sanding or pounding the the bearing ring in with a hammer (which is always the suggested workaround in the comments section). A 2% increase in the hole size still lets the bearing rings snap in tightly, but they can be inserted by hand or gentle pressure – yet almost nobody actually designs them that way.
BTW, just go to your nearest Dollar Tree and buy one of those hand-held fans that run on the AA batteries. Buy a pinwheel. Buy a Wheel-O. Buy a gyroscope. Buy a top. Teach her to flick a quarter(. Don’t act like these fidget spinners are the first and only objects in the universe to fucking spin. (And the fad will burn itself out well before the end of the year.)
The Slingshot Channel - Joerg Sprave decides to Weaponize Fidget Spinners…
Bolding mine. IMO you misspelled “weeks”. 
The best use I’ve found for them is as a cat toy.
My son got one and placed it on the floor spinning. Our three cats were soon surrounding it, staring intently at it as it spun. When it stopped they each took turns reaching out with a paw to give it a push and start it spinning again. It was actually quite cute and they were playing with it for most of an hour.
My son, himself, lost interest in it in about 10 minutes.
My mildly-on-the-spectrum son would have loved one of these when he was younger. He used to spin his books and drive the teachers nuts.
My anxious middle schooler likes the spinner and the fidget cube.
The cat is not interested.
Oh, they’re Fidget spinners. Well jeez, where’s the fun in that?
I was thinking of some for a couple of my coworkers. We’ve got Supreme Court Justice D-bag who bangs his wedding ring on his desk all day and especially when he’s trying to make one of his inane points, like it’s his gavel or something. Then we’ve got his li’l buddy, Nervous Nelson, who, when he isn’t cracking his knuckles (seriously?) he’s drumming his fingers. I’d like to find something for them to do that doesn’t cause me to want to break their fingers.
I’m old; I can only tune into the current fads every so often. Beanie Babies are still all the rage, right?
I was informed this morning that they’re no longer cool at my daughter’s school. Some kid brought one in today expecting to be like all the cool kids but everyone just rolled their eyes. Poor kid.
I’ll amend my previous statement, as a few days ago I had a student who definitely was distracted by his fidget spinner. On the other hand, I’ve never known that particular student to actually do any work, and the previous time I’d taught him (before the spinner craze), he was instead distracting himself by throwing scissors. So it’s probably still an improvement.
Well there you go–the next big fad item will be throwing scissors. (When I have was in middle school, I used to bring my throwing stars and throw them at trees at recess. But it was the simpler times of the great ninja fad of the 80s, when Asian martial arts weapons weren’t as frowned upon in school s as they are today.
That, or the teachers just weren’t paying attention to what the hell was going on.
Meh.
I’m old enough to remember the clackers fad of the early 1970s. Those suckers were LOUD, and could be dangerous if you let go of them or they shattered in mid-clack. I still remember the voice of my junior high principal on the PA system angrily declaring that clackers were BANNED BANNED BANNNNNED!!! from school.
Fidget spinners seem quaintly benign by comparison. In fact, I just learned about them a few days ago and I sorta want one.
If you look around the web there are several designs to make spinners out of Lego> I build one last night and compared it to my sons one. Pretty good approximation.
Hey, I still have a set of clackers from the 70s!
Someone so needs to make a gif showing Queeg using a fidget spinner.
And the Greeks have worry beads. No prayers necessary.