Best Buy Turned the $10 Toy Into a $120 Wifi-Enabled Piece of Crap

Best Buy is a dystopian hellscape. Not because it's Christmas Eve and because everything has been picked over by the masses, but because the store's selection has shifted to completely insane products no one could possibly want.

Perhaps age 27 is too young to become a back-in-my-day old man blogger, but I cannot stand idly by as Best Buy has begun selling almost exclusively overpriced smartphone-enabled garbage targeted at guilty parents and relatives who don't know any better. Simply put: In a time where streaming video games, movies, and songs have replaced its core business, Best Buy is only still in business because people are obsessed with giving physical stuff, regardless of the usefulness or value of that stuff.

A real product you can now purchase at Best Buy is the "Sphero 2.0," a $129.99 "smartphone-enabled ball" that rolls around on the table via taps on your iPad. Action figures no longer cost $10, they are $79.99 (on sale for $49.99 and come with smartphone-downloadable missions and controls that make them vibrate, light up, and make noises. Remote-control cars (similar to Hot Wheels, I guess) now come with computer AI, are iOS-enabled, and cost $88.99 (on clearance).

I remember the analogous toys I was getting for Christmas 15 years ago and I remember being a kid with a toy that didn't work like it did on the commercials. Surely, surely, no child is playing with a Sphero 2.0 for more than a couple hours. And surely the Anki DRIVE car AI is terrible, the controls buggy, the overall experience a disappointment, the Bluetooth shoddy. And we're spending hundreds of dollars on them!

Kids have short attention spans and short tolerance for shit that doesn't work immediately; when my Hot Wheels cars couldn't swing a loop-de-loop, I went back to playing Nintendo.

And that's really the point, I guess: The smartphone or the iPad is the toy, and once you've got one of those, buying these add-ons and accessories and toys are more or less like throwing money in the garbage. But Americans have a deep-seated need to buy a thing that can be wrapped and opened.

And so instead of buying kids the iTunes gift card they can use to run up in-app purchases they actually want in games they already play, we buy them Anki DRIVE cars or a hundred-dollar smart ball. You know that after failing to make the Bluetooth work for a half hour, they're just going to go back to playing Candy Crush, just like they were before they took the six seconds to tear through the wrapping paper.

This obviously isn't just happening with kids' toys. Best Buy now has an entire section of "smartphone-enabled breathalyzers," for the uncle who drinks sometimes but that already has every conceivable electronic (these are not like the ones the court requires if you get a DUI; they're merely gadgets). There are $60 (on sale) "GUNNAR Optiks - Heroes of the Storm Strike Gaming Glasses" for your gaming-obsessed son or nephew who literally wants nothing for Christmas because he's already got the game he likes and actually, he bought it on Steam, not at Best Buy.

There are still DVDs and Blu-Rays and CDs and video games at Best Buy because buying someone a digital download or a Spotify or Netflix subscription is somehow cheating them out of something "real." And there are dozens and dozens and dozens of different types of bluetooth speakers that all look, sound, and cost almost exactly the same. But they work with an iPhone, and doesn't your girlfriend need one for the shower, too?

We as a society have what we want—it's the phone, the iPad, the gaming rig. But we're so obsessed with the physicality of stuff as gifts that wholly unnecessary stores like Best Buy can survive off the aunts and uncles of the world who won't give up on wrapping paper.