How Urban Legend Destroyed the Ball Pit | Hacker News Reader

How Urban Legend Destroyed the Ball Pit

meghanboilard.substack.com

91 pointsbcohen12395 comments

Hi! This is the author of this piece, and since a lot of you seem to be interested in rise and fall of the ball pit, I wanted to add that there are two exceptions where the ball pit seems to live on (at least in the US):

- Here and there, you'll find ball pits that seem to exist for the sole purpose of providing Instagram photo ops and seem to be more for adults than children (The Color Factory chain of museums is a notable example)

- There also seems to be a growing demand for private ball pit rentals in the same vein of the rental bouncy houses you'll find sometimes at children's parties

I couldn't find a ton of up-to-date information concerning ball pits outside of North America, so it's interesting to hear that they're still alive and well in Europe! I suspected they might be thriving elsewhere based on this sort of silly article about a woman getting stuck in a ball pit in Singapore

https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/desperate-mum-drown...

Anyway, thanks for reading!

In Taiwan and Singapore, ball pits exist in like every single childrens in-door playground.

https://honeykidsasia.com/indoor-play-centres-in-singapore-f...

Few of these have photos.

Here's a couple of local articles about the mum drowning in the ball pit and the response from AirZone.

https://mothership.sg/2018/02/airzone-suspended-playground-s...

https://mothership.sg/2018/02/suspended-playground-net/

FYI, there is a big business of playplaces in Canada, and by and large, they appear to be independently run. Most of the ones I've been to have ball pits. The good ones have pneumatic "cannons" that kids can shoot the same balls out of.

Here and there, you'll find ball pits that seem to exist for the sole purpose of providing Instagram photo ops and seem to be more for adults than children

Come to think of it, the last time I saw a ball pit was at a party where Lipton was promoting sparkling iced tea (so there was a general bubble theme). You jumped into a ball pit and they took a video so you could post it to Instagram, or whatever.

They're also still super common in Australia, both for kids in playcenters and restaurants, and in nightclubs for the 18-23 year old demographic.

The article describes the lack of sanitation as a baseless part of the negative mythology, but a dearth of scientific studies (and questions of generalizability of the existing studies) does not mean that their reputation is without merit. When your kid finds turds in the ball pit you don't need a study to know there's a sanitation problem. Anecdotally, as a child I had a near 100% rate of coming down with an infection after visiting the local ball pit and witnessed the discovery of fecal matter by another child, which, combined with the repeated illness, led to a ban on further visits.

SAME. We learned fast that other parents gambled with diapers in public/shared places.

Exactly! And anecdotally speaking, almost every single one that I entered as a kid smelled like urine. Not that it ever stopped us from playing in it, but even as kids we knew that it wasn't a clean place.

Based on the frequency of my kids getting infected at daycare, I assume any activity where toddlers or even a little older get together has a near certain chance of transmission. Although, I still would not take my chances with a ball pit that I doubt is ever thoroughly cleaned.

Except, strangely enough, according to my anecdata, not COVID-19. For nearly 2 years there were, AFAICT, almost no cases of COVID transmission through our nursery. I'd love this to be followed up properly. I have a theory that not only are the kids more resistant, but the parents are too due to the circulation of the other coronaviruses in pre-school children, along with all the other various infections.

It's all changed somewhat with Omicron, but then it has everywhere.

But could this simply be down to the fact that people were actively managing/combatting COVID-19?

Maybe, but have you tried actively managing infection control policy in a group of 0 to 5 year olds?

That could be said until this year, but in France all restrictions where lifted before the presidential elections in April this year (for real) and weren't reintroduced ever since (even though we've had 2 Covid waves and 27k death in the meantime).

Yet, there's still no covid outbreak at my sons' daycare…

As an adult who grew up in country where ball pits simply weren't a thing:

My own ball pit? Hell yeah!

A public ball pit for adults? Depends on the crowd.

A ball pit for children? Haha no, there's no way someone didn't pee their pants in there, or dropped some food or snot.

It's surprising just how much mess a single chocolate bar can create.

I'd say actual junk playgrounds sound more sanitary.

And ignores all the people saying that cleaning them is the problem.

I'm yet another person who worked at a place with a ballpit as a teen. I loathed it. One Karen lets her brat with diarrhea in, and it's closed for 2+ hours as someone making minimum wage loads every single ball, some with shit on them, into a net bag and runs it through the commercial dishwasher. Then hand wipes every tube.

Meanwhile, a line of other Karens are taking out their rage at not having the ballpit available to them Right. This. Instant! on a bunch of minimum wage coworkers.

At least three times a month during summer, btw.

Is there any other term than "Karen" you can use here? It's pretty offensive to anyone with a Karen in their life.

I can't help but think of the Dashcon ball pit meme whenever ball pits are mentioned. See at about 3:40 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ZgxeX2dCnQ

For those that don't want or can't watch a video: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DashCon

JUMP IN THE PIT

An almost hour long Dashcon video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPwgSXZJcok

I guess this is limited to the US? Ball pits are going strong here in Europe, they're a staple of every indoor playpark.

There's a special machine for cleaning them, it looks a bit like the robot from teletubbies

No, ball pits are ubiquitous at most indoor play parks here too, the author is extrapolating their disappearance from fast food restaurants, and correlating it to the 90s rumor mill. These rumors were definitely a thing, but more than just ball pits have been removed; most McDonald’s locations have had their entire PlayPlaces removed, due to the fact that people don’t sit down in fast food restaurants anymore, and also a general race to the bottom in terms of economics to remain competitive.

Yah, and to be honest-- good riddance. PlayPlace was definitely non-core, not-well maintained, etc.

because they used to market to kids. the whole place was kid oriented. fast food switched their demographic to adults about 15 years ago with great success

They're still common in Chick-Fil-A, and they complement the playgrounds with family night activities for kids on certain days of the week. Chick-fil-A prob doing better than ever too.

Tbh Chick-Fil-A is the only fast food restaurant where im like "damn this slaps" not "meh its food ig". Food i actually like eating at fast food prices.

Chicken Fillet is good; but I’d hardly describe it as “fast-food prices.” Although it is fast food. It’s more like a chain restaurant prices (think Olive Garden and such).

No fast food places have "fast food prices" anymore unless you heavily coupon and/or use their apps. Seems to be a method of price discrimination. If you're poor you know about the app and coupons and never pay menu prices. If you're not then you think "god damn, fast food got expensive" and pay menu price anyway, when you happen to go to such an establishment.

Like, they've always done coupons, but menu prices used to also not be a complete rip-off. They are, now.

In-N-Out is a nice exception. I don't think I've ever even seen an In-N-Out coupon.

I did not even know chick fil a had play areas (between west coast and north east). I thought all the play areas in McDonalds and Burger King had closed down due to liability reasons.

I haven't seen a new play area in years, but some of the older franchise locations continue to run the ones they have.

Chick-Fil-A's core demographic is somewhat wealthier than McDonalds (the food is somewhat more expensive), and I think that helps keep the play areas clean and organized.

(fewer parents trying to use it as free daycare...)

They require the franchisee to be a full time manager so they are more invested in the cleanliness of the store.

I've never been to Chick-Fil-A, I'm not a big chicken guy, but now I think about it the one near me does have a spot for play place and none of the other chains do. Guess I'll have to try them out, any business that goes out of their way to make the experience fun for kids will get some of my money.

From what I’ve noticed, the Chik-Fil-A playplaces are considerably smaller than the McD’s and BK places of yore, just fair warning, YMMV.

Research their political donations first before deciding to patronize them.

given that they're closed on sunday you don't really have to do any research to know they're a christian organization

That isn't the issue. Lobbying the government to strip people of their liberty is.

yea, like i said, christian organization

They've almost entirely eliminated fast food play areas in the Northeast, but I was surprised to see them everywhere in Lexington KY. I wonder why.

A lot of McDonald's are franchised, its probably up to the franchise owner whether or not to build a play area. In the age of covid and monkeypox I doubt many franchisees would shell out the cash.

And of course they have been closed for COVID for a few years.

I'm glad you have a machine for cleaning them. One thing I noticed in the US, even as a child, was that ball pits were filthy and musty. I don't think they were ever cleaned.

Video of the "Ball Washing Machine" (this is actually from the US):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PrHvFiePokI

This is UK:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T8VjIJuMyiE

Huh. That goes a lot slower than I would have expected. I wonder at their procedure for getting all the dirty ones out before the freshly-cleaned ones start piling back in.

Not complaining, glad to see them taking hygiene seriously.

The UK video I posted has some details, 15,000 balls per hour doesn't seem that slow to me[1], and still, according to the video, they are putting the clean ones into "netsacks".

Most probably when they have the sacks full there are not that many "dirty" balls remaining in the pit and they can put a separator of some kind across it to start putting back the cleaned ones.

Found the site of the manufacturer of that machine:

https://ball-pool.eu/services/

What I doubt is more that the cleaning is actually done on a weekly basis or so as recommended.

[1] I have no idea on how many balls are in the "average" pit, but the US video is touting 80,000 as if it was an extremely large one

I really hope the adventure playgrounds mentioned are still a thing.

The ones in Germany were a bit more organized than just a pile of junk, but you basically went there, maybe parents paid some (nominal) fee or deposit, and you got a toolbox with basic hand tools like a saw, hammer and nails and there was plenty of wood to build with.

Larger structures were clearly built with some guidance and probably a civil engineer because there were multi-story buildings.

Yeah, I don't think we're giving kids saws and nails to play with.

Saying that where I grew up there were a lot of homes being built so there were piles of scrap wood, etc all over and we'd raid them and build forts using saws and nails from our dads' workshops. So maybe we are overprotective today.

The nice thing about such basic hand tools is that you usually get to learn from mistakes without permanent consequences. Will a child hurt themselves at least once with a saw and a hammer? Probably. Will they seriously hurt themselves? Probably not. Will they learn to not hurt themselves? Almost certainly.

I also don't remember how exactly supervision works, but it definitely isn't just dumping a bunch of kids at some unattended construction site. Parents and/or the team managing the place are at the very least nearby.

We crafted wooden swords and then fought with them. Worst we ever got was some stinging fingers or a bruise.

Wow, as a Brit with an engineer/machinist father, this would have been amazing to go to as a kid. We have absolutely nothing like that here short of taking a woodworking class.

Here I thought this would be about dashcon and the beloved ball pit. Extra time in the ball pit for all.

I just assumed they were removed because they were too hard to clean.

My kids’ school has actually retained some elements of the junk playground. In the courtyard play area, there is a wealth of scrap wood that the kids use for building projects. When we did the tour before enrolling our kids, the older kids had just built a shed which I thought was appropriate because the school is based on John Dewey’s progressive education ideals, with his central example he returned to many times in his writings being, building a shed.

Amusingly, the director of the school, didn’t know this.

Where was this? As a STEM teacher, I'm wanting to push for more things like this.

Oak Park, Illinois. https://www.thechildrensschool.info

The Rise & Fall of The Ball Pit - Theme Park Crazy

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uahX7iEl_fI

Heh, before the internet rumor mill existed, I had friends who worked at fast food joints with ball pits. They ALWAYS complained about kids pissing in the ball pits. That scared me off from ever messing with them as a young adult (and they didn't have them around my area when I was the right age/size to play in one).

Playgrounds in restaurants take staff time to clean. You have to do the windows since they get all fingerprinted. You have to sweep and mop the floors. Usually you send someone into the structure itself with a pack of sanitizer wipes and hope for the best. At a busy fast food place like chickfila, where they staff 15 people on a closing shift, they can afford to have an area like this. At a mcdonalds with a staff of 2, no chance.

TLDR: They got rid of them due to a hoax originating from South Africa that a child got spiked with a heroin needle and died from an overdose.

I came here thinking it was the infamous tumblr Ball Pit. https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/dashcon

I’ve forgotten what it’s like to be in ball pits. Are they even swimmable or do you just sink straight down? What if there was a very deep ball pit, think 12 feet or so. Could it be escaped by swimming back up?

I don't know for sure, but I don't think so. The balls are very light, so there's almost no buoyancy. The only way to support yourself is if the balls are locked in place from the force of your foot stepping on it, which might work for a stack 2~3 balls in height at the most before it becomes unstable and slips out from underneath you.

So presumably there could be a very deep ball pit with smooth walls somewhere in the world that is filled with the rotting skeletons of dead children at the very bottom?

With enough kids they’d stack corpses to climb out.

Indeed, this would make a good high concept movie, taking place entirely within a ball pit, kind of like that movie Ryan Reynolds did buried in a box underground. Good jump scare when a kid finds a dead face while rummaging through the balls.

> the boy found peace in his formative years crawling among the debris and refuse on the outskirts of post-blitzkrieg Manchester.

As far as I know, Hitler never tried to take England in a blitzkrieg. It seems like the author just wanted to use a hip word, but they completely lost my interest with that mistake

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