826
It's surprising that no one has thought of it first.
(lemmy.world)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 14 Jul 2024
826 points (98.8% liked)
memes
10412 readers
851 users here now
Community rules
1. Be civil
No trolling, bigotry or other insulting / annoying behaviour
2. No politics
This is non-politics community. For political memes please go to !politicalmemes@lemmy.world
3. No recent reposts
Check for reposts when posting a meme, you can only repost after 1 month
4. No bots
No bots without the express approval of the mods or the admins
5. No Spam/Ads
No advertisements or spam. This is an instance rule and the only way to live.
Sister communities
- !tenforward@lemmy.world : Star Trek memes, chat and shitposts
- !lemmyshitpost@lemmy.world : Lemmy Shitposts, anything and everything goes.
- !linuxmemes@lemmy.world : Linux themed memes
- !comicstrips@lemmy.world : for those who love comic stories.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
It's not necessarily about usefulness but rather quantity and economics of scale.
The number of people needing wheelchairs in the first place is pretty small compared to the population, and adding the additional caveat of those that can still use their legs fully to power what is effectively a bicycle, results in a venn diagram with an extremely tiny use case.
The cost of a decent basic wheelchair (not AliExpress/Walmart shit) is already high. Adding the complexity of a bicycle on top of that just makes it more expensive. And then there's insurance which almost certainly would tell you to kick rocks before they would even think of covering a fraction of the cost because it isn't necessary.
This is literally why those silly "as seen on TV" product commercials makes sense. You know, the ones where ordinary looking people seem super, incompetently incapable of doing normal everyday tasks. The snuggie sure seems stupid... Until you realize it it's meant for people who are disabled with mobility issues. Then it makes complete fucking sense. Most of those things were designed for disabled people, but that's a really small market to appeal to, so they broadened their market in order to make the things affordable to the actual target demographic.
I met a guy while I was working at Amazon whos dad bought a couple snuggies for hunting and overnight drives, and apparently his elderly disabled grandma who just didnt watch tv claimed half of then. This was apparently in the mid to late 2000s. Also according to him his grandmother wasnt a ludite his grandpa ran a movie and videogames rental place, and had built a whole as mini threatre in their living room.
Also according to him his grandma liked halo 2 and kicking his ass in smash melee.