I know you mean well but this is the worst advice you could give someone with a treadle feeder. Yes, the manufactures of the guillotine style feeders tell you to do this but they tell you to do this for another reason.
The standard training recommended is three weeks, lock the feeder open using their "training bolts" for a week, move it to another set of holes so the treadle moves a bit when the hens use the feeder for another week, then remove the bolts and go to full operation for the third week. Most people are honest and thoughtful, they hate to return a product knowing the cost to the seller so they will try a bit longer.
Now they are past the 30 day return period......this probably makes it possible to sell on
Amazon if you have a well made, fairly expensive to produce, low profit margin product. This is not the standard though, the majority of
Amazon sales, over half, are Chinese produce products with fantastic markups, five, ten times the cost of producing. With that margin you can stand one in ten items being returned.
This would not be the case with an item like the Grandpa feeder which while being a very old, very unsafe, very outdated design, it is well made with heavy steel and is costly to produce. They started off selling north of $250, absorbing around 35% loss from
Amazon fees and positioning freight for the product, leaving them with maybe $160 to manufacture the feeders in China and ship them to the U.S. That cost would be maybe $9 per feeder, leaving them with $151.00. Now they were paying maybe $30.00 for the Chinese furniture company to produce the feeder, a five times markup, sustainable even with a good number of returns.
The Grandpa knock offs, also Chinese made, are going as low as $60.00 retail before the tariffs, meaning they were likely going wholesale for less than $30.00. And the market rarely gets pricing wrong, this is all they are worth, and for some folks the feeders work especially if they are not overrun with rodents before the feeders are put in use.
In most first world countries, 5% profit at year end is a good year. Not so in China, some of the suppliers I used years ago told me they sold at cost, the CCP subsidized (paid for) the internal shipping to port and the port fees and sometimes they pay the entire shipping cost to the first world port. The profit for the producer is a 10% rebate the CCP gives out to exporters. Or this is how it worked prior to 2016, might have changed, I am not sure.
So, the knock offs can flood in and stand 25% returns which destroy the profit on 75% of the sales, and still move their product. Chinese sellers on
Amazon are NOT trying to make a retail profit; they are moving goods trying to survive in China and breaking even while getting their 10% rebate from the CCP is a good year.
I've done the math, our feeder would have to go from $85 to double that in order to sell on
Amazon and not lose money. Grandpa NEEDS the majority of the sales to miss the 30 day return policy. So they recommend a training period that takes up the majority of the 30 days.
Now, with the explanation of their training recommendation out of the way, what does work?
You train the way the feeder is used. With the lid or door moving so that the chicken understands IT IS SUPPOSED TO MOVE! So they are not freaked out when the lid does start going over their head. Even with the proper inward swinging door you MUST allow the door to move and allow the chickens to get hungry enough to make them bold enough to try the newfangled contraption.
IF the feeder is solid as a rock, no wiggle, no wobble, totally still as far as the box is concerned, IF the treadle bottoms out so the hen can pin down the treadle with one leg while standing on the other leg, 95% of all chickens will take to the feeder in a few days. One gets it, then two, then they all figure it out while eating with the smarter or bolder hens.
Chickens are smarter than most of us realize. They see the feed, they know where the feed is. At most, toss some treats into the hopper while they watch then let them learn.
You do NOT sit there with them opening the feeder. That is teaching the hens that YOU need to open the feeder for them.
What you do is use your toe to depress the treadle. One will step up and try to eat. Let her eat for three to four seconds then gently push her away a few inches so she comes back.
If a hen doesn't step up, they are not hungry enough. Go do something else for two hours and come back and try again.
If your feeder door has an adjustable spring tension and it should, set the tension low enough that your lightest bird, say three pounds, can use the feeder. Have the feeder rock solid on a platform of three patio blocks so there is plenty of room in front to step up, don't think they can step up 10" onto a treadle. Later you can increase the spring tension to keep out mobs of rats or multiple squirrels. Block off the side access with milk jugs of sand or dirt. The silly metal side guards kill more birds than they save with the guillotine style feeders. The fewer pinch points the safer the feeder.
Rarely does a flock need to go to bed without learning to use the feeder or enough of them learning so the others can eat. But if they do, you have done something wrong! Now the hens go hungry for overnight. They won't die, they will be like little T rexs in the morning. They will eat.
But the flock owner HAS to follow the instructions to the very letter. Nothing left out. Nothing added. After selling tens of thousands of feeders we know what works best, not a first time user.
If after the second day and none of the hens are using the feeder you have NOT followed the instructions. It is hard to explain things briefly so people will read yet completely so it works. At that point, remove the feeder. WAIT three hours and put their old feeder back in. DO NOT give in and hand feed, do not reward them for being stubborn and refusing to use the feeder without that three hour wait.
Before you do that though take pictures from all three sides and send those pictures to the manufacturer who should have given you an email address. Do NOT call, pictures are needed to diagnose. Give a detailed description of how you trained and what happened or what didn't happen. While waiting for the response hit the reviews for the feeder on the website and learn from others.
What you will find is maybe 3% that admit they had trouble and most of them will admit they didn't follow the instructions at first and they will warn you to follow the instructions. One customer, I bet I spent three hours on the phone with him over the course of a week after his emailed pictures arrived. On the last day he reported success and I asked what he did different. He said he finally followed the directions......
Now by this time, this was a challenge to me, and this dude was easily one of the smartest men I had ever met. A doctor, a researcher, and a law degree. When he finally fessed up and admitted to not following the directions I had to ask why. His reply, the training process was not logical.....
Logic doesn't work on chickens. Instinct does, grabbing a perch with one claw, being hungry so they are motivated, not trusting something that wobbles around in use.
So thanks for the attempt to help but pinning down a treadle is the absolutely worst thing to do for a properly designed treadle feeder, even the Chinese made feeders like the Grandpa and the many knock offs. Train like the feeder is used. Solid base, attached solidly to a wall or post, treadle bottoming out with enough room to pin the treadle down with one foot while standing on the other, there is no need to do anything else but follow the years old instructions that have been finely tuned over years of manufacturing
