When choosing waiting room toys for your business, there are a few things that should be considered before you buy. Getting the right kinds of toys is perhaps the most important aspect of making the choice in purchasing toys for your waiting area, because having the wrong kind will defeat the purpose. If a toy fails to occupy the children you mean to keep occupied, why have the boy to begin with? Luckily, there are a few steps that can be taken to ensure that you choose the best waiting room toys to meets your needs and the needs of your customers.
Keep a mental note of your customers or patients, and the ages of their children. Perhaps you can add an optional question to your forms asking about the number of children each patient has and their ages. This may give you a general idea of the types of waiting room toys to purchase. If the majority of your patients have babies and toddlers, be sure to get plenty of baby and toddler wait room toys. If you get mostly pre-teens, then focus a little more on that age group.
Choose toys that never go out of style and that are made well enough to last for years. If your waiting area toys are easily broken, then you may end up spending more money replacing them. It's best to get quality toys the first time around and get plenty of usage from them than to constantly spend money buying new toys. Sturdy toy options include things like wooden puzzles, play tables, and bead mazes or cubes.
Continue adding toys as you go along. Although the age analysis in step one will help you get started on your search for the best waiting room toys, patients change, children grow, and you will need to adapt. Try and set aside a certain amount from your budget each month to add new toys to your collection, and then once a year after you have something for every age group.
If you have kids yourself, keep a record of what types of waiting room toys they enjoy, or did enjoy if they are adults. Toys like mazes and climbing toys never go out of style, so if your children liked it odds are your patients' children will too. Better yet, when you can find the time, keep track of which toys are going over the best with kids in the waiting room. That way you'll know what to buy more of, and what to stop wasting money on.
If you still can't quite figure out which waiting room toys will go over best for your patients, try talking to them one on one after each visit (when appropriate of course. If you've diagnosed someone with cancer, you may want to skip this conversation). Ask them what kinds of toys they think they're children would enjoy playing with. Even better, ask the kids themselves! It may seem weird to you at first, but they'll appreciate the extra thought you put into their comfort; and that will have them coming back year after year!
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