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The original was posted on /r/talesfromretail by /u/wakeangel2001 on 2025-01-27 01:10:47+00:00.

I’m pretty sure I can’t name specific brands or retailers, but suffice to say this happened when I was working in the electronics section of a very famous toy store back when it was still a thing. It was not long after tablets first became a thing, and several companies had made tablets specifically for children, they only cost $150-200 as opposed to the $500-1000 that the “pro” tablets would cost, came with a bunch of popular game and educational apps built in, and of course parental controls. There was one particular tablet that was VERY popular that year, it was the big ticket item that Christmas, and we sold MANY of them. I would tell as many parents as I could that the device wasn’t a simple turn on and play affair, because it would require an initial setup so the parents could set up the account and access and everything like that. Let’s fast forward to the day after Christmas, which was the most popular day for returns and almost EVERY one of this one particular kids tablet that we sold was returned. It seems there was a pretty catastrophic issue, starting with the fact that pretty much all parents had ignored the warnings about the device’s need for setup and only opened it for the first time on Christmas morning. Imagine the experience of your kid opening their brand new tablet that they’ve been begging for for months and wanting to play with it right away, only for it not to work because all the parental setup needs to be done first, so you’re trying to do this with your overstimulated and impatient child screaming at you to make it work. Well as bad as that sounds, it got WORSE, as all of these parents trying to log in and set the devices up at the same time crashed the server used for account setup, so the brand new tablets were essentially BRICKED, I can only imagine all the disappointed kids on Christmas day…Now this technology was relatively new and being Christmas I imagine tech support wasn’t very helpful (or even available) so pretty much all of the people who couldn’t get the things to work right away just opted to return them, it was such a huge loss that I think the store company sued the company that made the tablet. The company did made one more tablet (Tablet name-2) the next year but by then the brand was poisoned and very few of them actually sold. The whole concept of children’s tablets seemed to die out by the next Christmas season and we just sold regular tablets in the following years.