RMS 34 Inch Extra Long Reacher Grabber – Foldable Gripper and Reaching Tool with Rotating Jaw

Prepare to go on a grab-fest!
TL, DR: great product; grabs items from a tiny piece of paper to a 24 ounce jar of nuts; sturdy, inexpensive, fun to use. A great help to anyone with mobility issues!Anyone who has experienced, or is experiencing, physical conditions that restrict mobility, knows the horror inspired by the sight or sound of an object dropping to the floor. Especially if you live alone.If something falls, unless it happens to fall right at my feet, if it has fallen out of reach, and I have to get down on my hands and knees to retrieve it, it’s as if the object has been sucked into a black hole. It’s just… gone. I have a long, L-shaped corner desk, and despite precautions, things fall off of the back of it all the time. Pens, bottles of acetaminophen, bottles of nail polish, mail, etc. etc. Even though the fallen objects are visible, sitting between the supports of the desk and the wall, I cannot physically bend down or crawl under the desk to pick them up. A sketchbook I was working in, and the journal sitting next to it, fell about three weeks ago. Although I used to write in both daily, they were as good as gone. All I could do was gaze at them, longingly.I finally decided, after an incident where I had to call a friend of mine to come over to retrieve an important document that had fallen behind the desk, that it was time to do something about the situation. I checked Amazon, and read systematically through the description of and reviews for the proliferation of grabbers. I chose this particular one because it got good reviews, and the price was reasonable.The RMS grabber arrived not in any box, or other kind of wrapping. It was just inside of a flimsy, plastic, non-padded Amazon envelope. This was a little odd, but the item was intact, and did not show any signs of damage, or of being a pre-used returned item. It arrived folded in half, with attached three-step instructions on how to unfold it and how to change the orientation of the grabber from vertical to horizontal. If these instructions had not been included with the item, anyone would intuitively know how to unfold the grabber (there is a button that says “PUSH” on the handle so you can fold or unfold it) and re-orient the grabbing end, just by observing and manipulating the grabber. Very simple.The grabber is 32” long from the tip of the end of the opened pincers, to the bottom of the handle, where the “trigger” is. The pincers have a 4” wide gap at the end as they sit open. The pincers are hard plastic that is lined with some kind of sturdy rubber.Well. You would not believe the fun I had, grabbing and retrieving all of the items that had plummeted to their “deaths” over the years! I had myself an unreachable object retrieving party, breaking in my new grabbers. I found a piece of mail dated 2021, which is around when my back began to prevent me from moving around freely. I found a bottle of perfume I had forgotten about. I picked up items that varied from a quarter-sized piece of flat black plastic, to an envelope, to the sketchbook, and the journal. Both of these hard bound books are 12” x 12,” and have some weight to them. They were wedged behind the desk. It took a few tries, and the help of a flashlight (and a good portion of patience) to finally retrieve the books. They are finally sitting on my desk next to me now. (The difficulty retrieving them was not due to the grabbers not working well. It was caused by their awkward positioning where they had fallen, behind the desk.)After I had picked up everything I could see, I decided to test the grabbers to find out what they were capable of. I dropped a piece of binder paper on the floor, and it landed flush with the carpet. The grabbers picked it up easily. I have a jar of mixed nuts on my desk. The width of the lid is about 3 3/4” wide, and the container’s weight is listed as 24 ounces (1 pound and 8 ounces) although there are at least three ounces missing from the container. I picked up the container of nuts in my hand, and thought- no. There’s no way these grabbers will be able to pick this up. To my surprise, the grabbers easily lifted the container of nuts off of my desk.I noted one thing that concerned me about this product. To change the direction of the grabber end from the grabbing mechanism being horizontal (take your hand and hold it out with the flat bottom of your palm facing the floor) to vertical (turn your hand sideways, so your hand is held with the thumb facing the ceiling, as though you are preparing to shake someone’s hand) that part of the grabber on the handle felt a bit- flimsy. There are obviously cables inside of the handle of the grabber, and you can feel and hear these moving around when you change the orientation of the grabbers. To do this, you pull on the grabber end, then turn it to change it from the tines of the grabber facing up and down to facing side to side. I just think that if this simple mechanism is over-used, or used roughly, it will fail fairly quickly. This is just my intuition: the grabber is *not* displaying any signs of becoming compromised. I personally am quite rough with my belongings, and have all my life needed to keep reminding myself to not force things when I am manipulating an object. It’s just due to my own lack of patience.The other thing I experienced while happily retrieving objects, was that the “trigger” to pull the two tines of the grabber together made my hand hurt after a few minutes of constant use. I have some arthritis in my right hand, so I am not surprised at this. Let me clarify, though, that the trigger mechanism is NOT stiff, or difficult to squeeze closed. It’s just the state of my right hand. And, after a few moments of resting my hand, I picked up the grabber and resumed my happy picking-things-up-time with no pain.Cons: grabber is 32” long, shorter than many others offered on Amazon. But it’s not really a con, as I am finding the grabber’s length to be perfectly adequate. I just now grabbed a citrus juicer- the kind with the glass jar on the bottom, and the pointy reamer thing on the top- from an unreachable height. I don’t know when I had done this, but I had at one point in the past put this citrus squeezer on the very top of my kitchen cabinets. (Not on the top shelf inside of the cabinet- on the very top of the cabinet unit itself.). So it was sitting at least seven feet above the ground. I am 5’ 2”, so I must’ve used the stepladder- which I hate using, it feels shaky- to store items up there. I had been wanting to make my neighbor a lemon meringue pie, but I’d forgotten that I had stranded the citrus juicer about eighteen inches beneath the ceiling.This grabber not only reached the glass citrus squeezer easily, it gripped onto it securely. I was mentally cringing in anticipation of the object slipping out of the grabber, falling to the kitchen floor, and shattering. I put this once unreachable object right down on my kitchen counter with one motion. Boom- done! So the items on the top shelves of the kitchen cabinets will be within reach again, given they have not been pushed to the very back of the cabinet. And, if that has happened, I can use my simple step stool as opposed to the gigantic ladder to retrieve these objects, now that I have this RMS grabber.Pros: can pick up a wide variety of items easily; item is well-built for such an inexpensive price; easy manipulation of the grabber part from horizontal to vertical orientation; and- it’s fun to use!So I can now write in my journal, and draw in my sketchbook again. It’s nice to have a clean area again around and under my desk. Later, I will make a lemon meringue pie. And I know that if I drop something, I won’t have to despair, being unable to get down on the ground to pick it up. For fourteen dollars, life has suddenly got a whole lot easier!I think this product lives up to its description, and to its good reviews. I whole-heartedly recommend it.(Edit) I had to add to my review, because, just now, I picked up a pill with this grabber. ONE PILL. I’m getting more and more glad I bought this item!

Helpful
I reviewed this before and didn’t give it a high mark but after using it for sometime have changed my opinion.It is more sturdy than it looked and easily picks up objects from a high shelf with it’s rotating handle. Whether retrieving socks from under the bed, bottle caps under furniture, boxes on a high ahelf, works great. Just don’t try to pick up heavier items for which it was not intended.