Product Review: Drop Stop
They say that you often don’t know what you had until it’s gone. Such is the case with Drop Stop, a simple device that we were asked to sample more than a year ago, but kind of forgot that it was silently doing its job in my wife’s 2008 Sienna. Now that the Sienna is gone and we think we forgot to remove Drop Stop from it, we’re wishing that we still had it.
What exactly is Drop Stop? It’s a simple device designed to block the gap between your seat and the center console so that you don’t lose objects such as pens, coins, cell phones, parking garage cards, etc. into the no man’s land between the seat and the console. It sort of looks like a miniature wetsuit arm (since its outer covering is black neoprene) that is filled with hypoallergenic fiberfill. There is a slot built into it that you put the seatbelt catch through, which ensures that the Drop Stop does not move.
It’s a fairly simple solution, but it works well. When you move the seat, the seatbelt anchor moves with the seat, and the Drop Stop moves along with it, usually not getting caught on the console. If it does bunch up for whatever reason (generally it would only happen if moving the seat forward) just pull Drop Stop from the opposite end of the seatbelt anchor and stretch it to its normal shape, which takes one second.
As mentioned in the opening paragraph, not having Drop Stop in my wife’s van made me appreciate it – and miss it. In the past few weeks, we’ve lost pencils and coins between the seat and the console, then last weekend, a few drops of McDonald’s Shamrock Shake hit the carpet in our new 2013 van between the seat and console. Had Drop Stop been standing guard for us, the milkshake would have hit that rather than the carpet of a new van. Now we don’t just have to clean milkshake off of our new van’s carpet, but also have to figure out how to wedge our hands into that nether region in order to do cleaning. The old Sienna had a removable console, but I’m not sure that the new one has that feature, so it should be interesting.
Their informercial is just two minutes, and it’s kind of funny – so here you go.
If you would like to get a Drop Stop of your own, go to www.buydropstop.com. For $19.99 plus $7.95 shipping, you get two Drop Stops. If you order more than one set, they’ll ship additional sets for free. I checked Amazon for them in case there was a free shipping offer, and no luck – it looks like you have to buy them directly from the Drop Stop website. Amazon does have a cheaper alternative, but it’s clear that Drop Stop is a superior product from looking at the listing for the competing product.
Drop Stop provided one Drop Stop for review. We wish we still had it.
Update: I showed this review to my wife, and she suggested a place to look for the Stop Drop – we found it!!
