(WSVN) - It was the hottest toy of the holiday season. But then Hatchimals turned out to be the biggest disappointment for children whose eggs didn’t hatch.
Now a California mother has filed a class-action lawsuit against Spin Master, the toy maker of the much-hyped Hatchimals, after she said the toy she bought for her daughter never emerged from its egg.
The toy’s gimmick is this: kids play with the large egg by rubbing and tilting it in order to get the interactive creature inside to “hatch,” or poke its beak through the egg’s plastic shell.
Once cracked, the child can remove the top part of the egg to find out what kind of species is inside. One of five possible animals is hidden inside the shell.
Retailers promoted Hatchimals heavily leading up to the holiday shopping season, leading to long lines for parents vying for the scarce toy before Christmas. It retails for $50, but was selling for as much as $350 on sites like eBay.
When a number of children couldn’t get the eggs to hatch, Spin Master was flooded with angry calls and comments on their social media feeds.
The lawsuit called the Hatchimals craze a “bait-and-switch marketing scheme” that equated the malfunctioning eggs to children getting “coal in their stockings.”
Spin Master said the lawsuit’s allegations were inaccurate, and countered that the company “provided troubleshooting support and where required immediately made available replacement products for those few consumers whose toys did not work as they anticipated,” in a statement to CNBC.
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