FitPlus PowerGrip Reacher: An Honest Review

I bought the FitPlus PowerGrip T9 seventeen months ago, four days after my hip replacement, because the discharge papers said not to bend past a right angle and I had already dropped the television remote twice that morning. I am 74 years old. I live in a one-story brick ranch outside Tupelo, Mississippi, with three steps from the carport to the kitchen door, and until that spring I had never owned a grabber in my life. My wife Doris watched me open the box on the kitchen table and said, well, that looks like a tool for picking up trash in the church parking lot. She was not wrong. It is also the thing that has kept me out of the floor more times than I can count, and I want to tell you about it honestly, including the parts I would just as soon not admit.

Most reviews of a reacher are written in the first week, when the tool still feels like a novelty and the surgery still feels like a fresh emergency. That is not when you find out whether something earns its keep. You find out at month six, when the novelty is gone, when your hands are stiff in the morning and the newspaper is on the porch boards again and nobody is coming to fetch it for you. So treat this as a report from month seventeen. Not from the box, not from the first afternoon, but from a house where the thing has been used every single day and is still standing in the corner of the living room.

How I've Used It Every Day for 17 Months

The newspaper is the job I bought it for, and it is still the job it does first thing every morning. Ours lands on the porch boards, not in a box, and the porch is a step down from the door. Before the surgery I would have walked out, bent at the waist, and had it in two seconds. After the surgery that bend was off limits for six weeks and it has never felt like a good idea since. So I stand in the doorway, reach out with the FitPlus, close the jaw on the folded paper, and bring it back to me. It takes four seconds. It is not dignified. It works every time, and it works without me leaning over a step I could misjudge.

The second job is everything I drop, which is a longer list than I expected. Keys. Coins. The little screws off a cabinet hinge. A pill that got away from me over the bathroom tile, which is its own kind of panic. There is a magnet on one end of this reacher, and it is worth understanding what it will and will not do before you count on it. It grabs a screw, a key ring, a bobby pin, the small metal stuff. It does not grab a dime or a nickel, because those are not magnetic, and no magnet on any tool is going to change that. Coins are a jaw job. Once you know that, you stop being annoyed and start picking them up properly.

The third job is the one nobody puts on the box, which is the laundry. Our dryer sits low and the drum is deep, and reaching into the back of it involves exactly the bend I am trying to avoid. I pull socks and shirts out with the grabber, a piece at a time, and drop them in the basket. I also use it on the low kitchen cabinets, the ones under the counter where the soup and the canned goods live, and in the back of the truck when something has slid toward the cab. Seventeen months of that, every day, and the jaw still closes square. That is the honest headline here. It has not gotten sloppy.

What Nobody Tells You Before You Buy a Reacher

A reacher is not a hand. It is a compromise you make with your back, and the sooner you accept the compromise, the better it works for you. You cannot feel what you are grabbing. You have to look. You have to line the jaw up, and you have to squeeze, and if the object is soft or flat or sitting flush against a surface with no edge to get under, the jaw will slide right off it. I have chased a single sock around the bedroom floor for longer than I care to admit. I have failed completely on a piece of mail lying flat on the coffee table. Those are the real limits, and no listing is going to tell you about them.

The spec that matters most is the jaw, and it is the one buried deepest in the description. A narrow jaw turns a reacher into a pickup stick for pens and nothing else. This one is wide, wide enough that I can take a folded newspaper in one bite, or a soup can, or a coffee mug by the handle. If you are comparing tools and one of them has a jaw you could not fit a newspaper into, that is your answer right there, regardless of what else the box says. Width is the whole game for anything you actually intend to move rather than just retrieve.

The other thing nobody says out loud is that placement beats quality. A good reacher in a drawer is worth less than a cheap one beside your chair. The failure mode is not the tool breaking. The failure mode is the tool being two rooms away when your knee gives you that little warning and you decide, just this once, to bend anyway. I keep mine within arm's reach of the recliner and I move it to the kitchen counter when I am cooking. If you buy one of these and put it in a closet, you have bought a closet ornament.

I have picked up more dropped pills, coins and screws with this thing than I can count, and not once did I have to bend past a right angle to do it.

The Grip, the Jaw, and the Magnet

The FitPlus uses a steel cable running down the shaft, and that is the part that decides how the tool feels in your hand. A cable tool has a directness to it. You squeeze and the jaw answers immediately, with no spongy delay and no sense that you are pulling against a spring that is winning. That directness is why I trust it with a glass jar. I still use two hands for anything heavy, and I still keep my feet under me, but the grip itself has never let a jar slip out of the jaw and onto the floor.

The ends are rubberized and textured, which matters more than it sounds. Bare metal jaws on a smooth jar are a gamble. The rubber holds, and it holds on a plastic bottle and on the handle of a skillet as well. I have had one gripe with it in seventeen months, and it is a maintenance gripe, not a performance one. A cable is a cable. I look at mine about once a month for fraying, the same way I look at the cable on the garage door. So far it is clean. That is a check I would tell anybody to make on any cable-driven tool, and it takes five seconds.

The magnet sits on one end and I use it more than I expected, just not for the things I expected. Screws, mostly. A dropped key ring in the gravel by the truck door, which is a small mercy when your knees are not what they were. What it will not do is pick up a coin, and I have watched more than one person leave a one-star review over exactly that misunderstanding. The listing itself hints at it if you read closely. A magnet picks up iron and steel. It does not pick up a quarter. Use the jaw for those and you will be fine.

Where It Frustrates Me

Setting it down is the worst part of owning it. At 9.52 ounces it is light enough to lift all day, and light enough that it does not stay where you put it. Lean it against the chair and it slides. Lay it across the armrest and it slides. I have gotten up out of a warm chair more than once to fetch the tool I dropped, which is a special flavor of aggravation for a man who bought the thing so he would not have to get up. A loop of cord would fix it. I have not done that yet. I am telling you because you will want to do it on day one instead of month eight.

Flat and soft things remain a genuine loss. A sock on a rug, a piece of mail lying flush on a table, a paper towel, anything with no edge to hook under. The jaw needs a lip or a corner. I have learned to nudge an item to the edge of a surface first, or to lift one corner with a finger, and then the jaw will take it. That is a workaround, not a fix, and it is the reason this is a four-and-a-half star tool in my house and not a five. It is also the reason I have not thrown out every other aid I own.

The last frustration is my own hands, not the tool. Mine are stiff in the mornings, and a squeeze is still a squeeze. On a bad morning I do the newspaper and leave the rest for the afternoon, when everything loosens up. If your hands are worse than mine, this is worth thinking about before you buy anything with a grip to it. My physical therapist was the one who told me to spread the grip work out instead of doing it all in one go, and that advice has been worth more than any feature on the box.

What It Replaced, and What It Didn't

This reacher replaced exactly one thing: bending over. It did not replace my shower chair, which I still sit on every single morning and which my physical therapist had me buy before the surgery. It did not replace the cane I take to church on Sundays, or the bed rail my son Wade put on my side of the bed about ten months ago after I had one wobbly first step in the dark. It did not replace the rollator that lives in the carport for the feed store and the grocery run with Doris. Those are different jobs. Anybody who tells you a grabber does the work of all of them is selling you something.

For the first six weeks after surgery, Doris put my socks on for me. I never bought one of those sock aids or a hip kit. I looked at them, the way I looked at a quad cane at the therapy clinic, and decided I could get by. Sitting on the edge of the bed and taking my time, I could. A man at church uses a rope ladder to sit up in the morning and swears by it. That is his back and his bed, not mine. The point is that the reacher was the one piece of gear out of all of it that I reach for without thinking, and it is the one I would replace first if it walked off.

Who This Is For

This is for the person who has been told not to bend, or who has learned the hard way that bending is a bad trade, and who wants one tool that lives where they sit. It is for a house with a low dryer, low cabinets, a porch with a step down to it and a newspaper that lands on the boards. It is for stiff morning hands that can still manage a squeeze if they do not have to manage twenty of them in a row. If that sounds like your week, the FitPlus PowerGrip T9 has earned its spot in my living room, and I would buy it again tomorrow at the same price I paid, which I am not going to quote because it will not be the same price tomorrow.

It is also a fair first tool for somebody who is not sure they need help yet. It is a small thing to set beside a chair. It does not announce anything to a visitor. Nobody looks at a grabber and thinks about your hip. They think you are a person who does not like bending, which is most people over seventy and a good many under it.

Who Should Skip It

Skip it if your hands cannot close on a grip and hold it, because that is the whole mechanism and there is no version of this tool that works without it. Skip it if you are looking for something to lean on when you walk. This is not a cane and it will not hold you up, and using it that way is how people end up on the floor. Skip it if the things you drop are mostly soft and flat, since the jaw will slide off them and you will be disappointed. And skip it if you are going to keep it in a closet. Ask your doctor or your physical therapist whether a reacher fits what you are dealing with, and how to use one without putting your shoulder or your back in a bad spot. Mine had opinions and they were good ones.