Background: I am an electronics repair man as a side job, hopefully to be my fulltime job sometime in the next few years. My roommates have a daughter who is special needs. I am not sure of the exact nature of her disability, but she cannot move or speak and she is heavily medicated. She is almost 9 but is wheelchair bound and looks around 5 years old. She can manipulate toys by veeeery slightly moving her hands.
So my roommates asked me if I could take a look at the above toy because it was very expensive. They told me it cost them $300 which is more expensive than the website but they didn’t just get it and I’m sure some brick and mortar store could’ve easily marked it up that much. My roommates are from Mexico and I don’t think they know how to shop around online.
I took apart this freaking POS and it is ATROCIOUSLY put together. Tape and glue wildly used to jerry-rig the entire thing together, and, I suspect, to keep costs down from using screws (more on that in a second). The board that controls the music is about 1" square, and the wires to it are ALL barely soldered onto it, there is tons of exposed wire and the wire that is there is extremely low quality. This soldering work would’ve gotten me an F in my Electronics 100 class in high school. Here are pics of this “craftsmanship”:
There is probably 6$ at MOST worth of materials on this piece of garbage, and my roomates paid hundreds for it…and also it has a “proudly made in the USA” sticker on the bottom which I absolutely do not believe. It would take way to long (time being money) to make this the incredibly low quality, ass backwards way this company did. I am right now designing a high quality PCB for a product I make a few dozen of per year, it will cost me a few hundreds of dollars to prototype, but it still makes financial sense for me to do so. Why? Because soldering wires to wires is a waste of time, and time=money in the USA, and labor is generally higher than part cost for low level electronics such as this. So I am making a high quality PCB which will eliminate as much soldering as possible so I don’t have to solder two wires to a metal loop like the genius who made this did. But overseas where labor is next to free and parts are a larger part of the cost of a product, it would make sense for a barely-paid no-skill solderer to solder two wires to a metal loop rather than design a higher quality PCB from the beginning.
Anyways, I think this is a huge scam and I’m so mad my roommates with a special needs daughter got ripped off trying to buy a toy she could interact with the world. :mad:
This is a really sad post…at the same time I know that a lot of this products are sold/priced to insitiutions (children.s hospitals, schools, etc) and so are wildly overpriced for what you get. Spending tax-payer’s money. There are better options out there… http://www.communityplaythings.com/
As a parent of a special needs child, believe me everything is over priced. Most companies say “It is needed due to the limited sales nature of the product” Which for the most part I would agree with, it is hard to compare say Toy 1 for 90 out of 100 seven year old children and Toy 2 for 10 out of 100 children.
My problem lies in the dual use items I cannot find a link at the moment but it is a electronic toy first for something like toddlers but redid as a toy for special needs language development. While the toddler toy was priced at 29.00$ the “autistic” version was almost 100.00$. It was a big comment battle on Amazon and there really was no excuse for that. It isn’t real hard to find a lot of special needs toys as regular toys though, and once we as parents found that out it became a much cheaper method of shopping.
As for your shoddy product find, that is horrible in so many ways, one drop and it is done, over priced and cheaply made. Seems more like a money grab than anything. I am hopeful people doing a search on reviews of enablingdevices and their musical snail will find this and choose a better made alternative.
And the sad thing is, it never ends. Anything “special needs” or “for disabled” is so frequently overpriced AND shoddy. The mark up is staggering at times. Of course, as the disabled age into adults the products are different, but, again, the fiscal exploitation never seems to end. I sometimes think that’s how my spouse ended up an engineer - it was either learn to adapt/make his own stuff or starve.
I remember a couple of years ago a buddy of mine got assigned to replace some parts on a pump motor controller, which involved some soldering. A supervisor came by when he was about almost done, scowled, and YANKED on the wires, taking with it almost all of the poorly-soldered joints. And then barked: “DO IT ALL OVER AGAIN!”
He’d have a conniption at seeing the innards of this toy even if it was 6 dollars. 300 dollars and he’d shove the toy up the CFO’s ass.
Thing is, that particular toy’s functionality looks a lot like any of a hundred chicco toys, only these aren’t marketed for “special needs children”, just for “young children” and with all attendant safety features etc. I have no idea whether chicco sells in the US, but there have to be similar brands around… (ETA: yes they do, USA is listed in their international site)
Story told before.
My Dad’s job-before-last was 13 years in management positions at an electronics-assembly factory; they built all kinds of electronic household items but the main line was TVs.
His last job was as Purchasing Manager for a hospital which, at the time he was hired, hadn’t been put in service yet. He had to buy the linens, and the lamps, and dry lentils for ObGyn (serious, they were used to make “pillows” to place on new-mothers’ bellies), and the TVs for the rooms, and the monitors for the machines (actually, TVs which could not pick up a signal from the air).
When the preapproved electronics supplier told him their absurd prices and claimed that they were due to being “material appropriate for medical environments”, his reply was “what, your TVs have been autoclaved? If they had been, they wouldn’t work!” A call to a friend in his former job got everything for less than 1/4 what the preapproved supplier wanted.
It’s a scam, and like every scam it aims for those who are most vulnerable :mad:
I started to make a comment about how that looked like it had been assembled by a special needs work group.
Then I realized how innapropriate such a comment would be.
A special needs work group would have done a far superior job.
If this thing is produced for distribution on a national level, how about putting together a story outline and submitting it to 60 minutes or one of those shows that likes to do consumer scam segments?
Proloquo2Go is however a great app. I admit for the first time I can recall actively stealing a product, and that was the only reason I jailbroke Jaelyns Ipod. When another program came out competitive to it, I restored the Ipod and we purchased a 45$ app (which if anyone is interested I will look when she gets home).
Now she has that program on her Ipad as well, and the reason her therapists and all around her totally love it, is we all can add to it from the internet. It wasn’t as fully featured as Proloqua2Go but allowing us to customize it 100% with her real world photos, is helping Jaelyn express her wants and needs.
On the rant of overpriced items, therapists wanted her to have a weighted blanket. Fine, hop online and found a bunch anywhere from 100 to 300$. Call my mom, make a run to a craft store have one made in a day for under 30. My mom then was asked to make at least a dozen more, these were custom made with characters or themes the children wanted, Barney, Spongebob, Thomas The Tank Engine, Barbie etc.
My mom was so upset at the prices they were charging online that she still has an open offer for parents around here.
Back to the OP and my dismay at shoddy overpriced items meant for special needs. It is sad that many of the items being sold, and endorsed are supposedly made by those touched with a special needs child. That is a shame.
One, there’s no need to buy that specific toy - others will do- and two – pppppppfffffffffftttttttttttttttttt some people have no shame.
My dad owns a toy company. Let me see if we have extra age approps stuff. Sometimes we do, sometimes we don’t, but I’ll be there in December and can have a look-see?
I know nothing about “special needs” children or their toys, but when I clicked that link, the first thing I thought was “That looks like a toddler toy that’d cost about $14.95 at K-mart.”
I don’t understand what it is about this toy that is supposed to make it good for “special needs” people.
To put it another way: If parents of special needs children would buy this toy for their kid because she’s special needs, why wouldn’t they just go buy a similar-looking toy from Toys R Us for $20?
There isn’t on this particular toy, possibly the buttons are tactilely more sensitive than a toy for regular children. Doesn’t excuse the quality or pricetag though.
The special joystick she has to control lights and gears is sensitive enough that her barely visible movements can control it, and not something that would be carried at a regular toy store, I can see why that would be a niche item and expensive.
It’s a toy, not intended to teach anything. This girl is borderline comatose, maybe it’s a sarcastic “Yippee…?” to you but she seemed to get enjoyment out of it. :rolleyes:
No, the point is, what does it do that makes it not cost 14.95 at Kmart? Answer in the case of your joystick-controlled device: it is much more sensitive than mass market items. Answer for this toy: apparently nothing: It’s a complete scam, a horrifically cynical one at that. As noted in your OP.
OP said:
Anyways, I think this is a huge scam and I’m so mad my roommates with a special needs daughter got ripped off trying to buy a toy she could interact with the world. :mad:
which makes it sound like it somehow helps her communicate … to me that means she indicates wants and needs … what it does is give her a toy to play with, not communicate with the world.
I think he meant it in the context that it gave her some kind of sensory stimulation and enjoyment she wouldn’t normally get since her impairment is so severe, not that it was meant to help her communicate or anything like that.
I am hopeful people doing a search on reviews of enablingdevices and their musical snail will find this and choose a better made alternative.