‘Amazing’ But Worthless We Don’t Need Vanna’s Smile Or Any Of These ‘Fabulous’ Products

The world needs food. The world needs steel. The world needs clothes and cars and coffee. But come on. Does the world really need a state-of-the-art banana slicer?

Or a home body-fat analyzer?

Or a fire-proof, acid-proof, laser-proof car wax?

No. No, it doesn’t.

But this is America. And that means if you really want your very own lighted, digital, automatic, real wood, two-speed, Turbo-Drive tie rack ($69.95), or the Vanna White Perfect Smile Tooth Whitening System from the dentists at the Institute of Dental Aesthetics ($49.95), well, by gum, you can have it.

Just turn on the TV. Pick up a catalog. Walk into almost any department store, and there it is - along with mounds of other gimmicky gadgets and garish gewgaws that (no offense, Vanna) the world can live without. Salad shooters! Super slicers! Bagel bashers!

For this coming Christmas season they’re even bringing back the Popeil Pocket Fisherman. Can Mr. Microphone be far behind?

Every year retailers sell countless billions of dollars worth of these fad-happy, marginally useful and largely unnecessary doohickeys that American consumers are only too happy to snap up. Considering that many of the products they buy end up gathering dust in a drawer, the question has to be asked: Who needs all this junk?

We certainly don’t, said consumer advocate David Horowitz.

“When you buy something like the super slicer, you use it once, then you stick it in the top drawer in your kitchen and there it sits for 12 years and then it finally ends up being sold at a swap meet for a buck ninety eight,” he said.

But still we continue to buy, persuaded by fast-talking salesman or dubious claims of miraculousness, believing that somehow the product will make our lives easier, happier or more convenient.

Some products may. But most won’t. In fact, there is a glut of products that are, arguably, completely useless. Horowitz found that out in more than 17 years of “challenging” products his “Fight Back” television show.

“The one that blew me away less than 10 years ago was Vacupants,” he said. “Remember Vacupants? (It) was a way for you to lose weight while you vacuumed. What you did is put on these plastic pants, and between vacuuming you took the hose and you hooked it up to the suck section of the vacuum, turned the vacuum on, and what it supposedly did was suck out the perspiration and the fat. I’m serious! The amazing thing about this was it was selling for $39.95 - and people bought it!” Recently Horowitz tested another product - the Miracle Thaw defrosting tray. The tray, he said, is supposedly made of a special “space-age” metal that will thaw things amazingly fast without electricity or heat.

Space age?

“I had a metallurgy lab at UCLA test it,” Horowitz said. “All it was was aluminum painted black. Aluminum conducts heat. You can do the same thing in an aluminum frying pan at home. Just put something underneath it to create an air flow and you’ve got it. You don’t need to spend money for this garbage.”

But people do. They also spend money for banana slicers. After all, this is a kitchen gadget that will make their life simpler!

Oh yeah?

Here’s all you do:

1. Go to your store and buy the banana slicer for $3.

2. Peel a banana and place it on a plate or cutting board.

3. Position the yellow, plastic slicer over the banana, then push down, thereby cutting said banana into 20 symmetrical slices.

4. Pick up the slimy slices with fork or fingers and redistribute them where you want, such as into a cereal bowl or fruit salad.

5. Wash the fork, wash your fingers, wash the plate or the cutting board and around and in between each of the 20 slats of the banana slicer, then enjoy.

There! Modern technology has just allowed you to pay for the privilege of doing something in five minutes that before you could do for free in 10 seconds. Ain’t progress wonderful?

Well, no. Not when we reach the level of rapacious - and largely mindless - consumerism we have today, said Michael F. Jacobson, founder of the Center for the Study of Commercialism in Washington, D.C. It’s not as benign as it may seem.

“We’re wasting our lives buying things,” Jacobson said. “Buying them, using them, fixing them, throwing them away. And that really distracts us from other things like caring about our society and spending time with family.

Ron Popeil, millionaire marketer and entrepreneur-at-large, begs to differ.

The chairman of Ronco, and the inventor of everything from the Popeil Pocket Fisherman to hair-in-a-can, says products like his may be largely frivolous, but they don’t have a negative impact.

“It creates jobs and profitability,” Popeil said. “It creates bigger corporations, they hire more people, and it’s good for the economy!”

Besides, he said, lots of people really love his products - especially his new ones. Recently, during the filming of an infomercial for a food dehydrator (his latest product), a woman said: “I wouldn’t want to give it up for anything!”

“So it does have a utilitarian value,” Popeil added. “But I would have to admit to you that most of my products, categorically, the consumer can do without. They’ve done very well without the inside-the-eggshell egg scrambler all their life.”

Today’s explosion of gadgets, gizmos and gewgaws is in large part a direct result of the explosion in infomercials, 800 numbers and other aggressive telephone marketing schemes, Popeil said.

To Horowitz, the problem is separating truly useful items from mindless junk. Bread makers, pasta makers and food dehydrators actually work and can be very useful. Other products are not so utilitarian.

“A lot of this stuff is an adjunct of a fad,” Horowitz said. “Like garlic. Garlic now has become big stuff because they have shown the medicinal properties of garlic. But this is how smart these marketers are. They sit in the back room and they say: ‘Look. Garlic is selling like crazy. Let’s find some way to tap into the garlic market. I got it! Let’s get some guy to invent some gizmo that peels garlic! People can peel the garlic themselves, and they can feel it’s easier for them, and we can charge them $14.95.’

“Well, nowadays you could buy an enormous jar of garlic already crushed and peeled for about $5.95. For $5.95 you could buy enough garlic to keep people away from you for five years, so why do you need the peeler?”

That’s the point, Horowitz said. You don’t.

The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = James A. Fussell Kansas City Star