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This Map Shows Which State Buys the Most Fidget Spinners

Californians are not chill with fidget spinners.
Robert Couse-Baker/Flickr

While we've covered how fidget spinners—the hot new spinning toy taking the globe by storm—are forcing China's factories to convert into full-time fidget factories overnight, we now know where exactly in the US many of these toys are ending up.

Slice Intelligence, a US-based online retail strategy provider that gets its data from receipts provided to it by retail partners, has mapped the distribution of fidget spinners sold online in the US per capita across 3,000 counties from January through May. The map was shared on Reddit's r/dataisbeautiful.

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Populated urban areas such as New York City are hotspots, but where fidget spinners are really thriving is Middle America.

"Middle America boasts the highest concentration of fidgeters per capita, championed by Utah and Texas," said Slice in a blog post this week. "Slice data shows that Utah has seen the highest number of spinners sold per capita in 2017, with four spinners sold online for every 100 residents."

That's a heck load of spinners.

But venture west to California, and it's a different story. Jammed outside of the spinning centrifuges of Oregon, Nevada, Utah, and Texas, California shows up all green on Slice's heat map.

Read more: Fidget Spinner Manufacturers Are Marketing Their Toys as a Treatment for ADHD, Autism, and Anxiety

But Slice's data doesn't tell the whole story.

"I live in Cali and see those things everywhere yet it's green on the map. I can only imagine Florida is some kind of post-apocalyptic fidget spinner wasteland," said one redditor.

Could it be that most Californian spinners are choosing to get their toys direct from gas stations, Walgreens and phone repair shops, rather than Amazon?

For now, it's just too early to tell. Larger stores such as Target have only recently started stocking the toy, so it'll be a few weeks before any meaningful data arrives. What we do know is that the toy is insanely popular, currently accounting for 17 percent of all toy and game units sold daily, according to Slice.

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