Because there's a word for things that don't consume. That word is "dead".
Back when I was single, I used to avoid infomercials like the plague.
Didn't matter what the product was, or how enthusiastically it was being huckstered. My attitude was pretty simple: if traditional retailers refused to stock it, it was ipso crapto a waste of time and money.
I felt the same way, truth be told, about things like Avon (despite the fact my mom was a rep for a time), Regal (for no reason whatever except it seemed sleazy to me) and Mary Kay (because, obviously, I have a penis).
Ditto anything else sold door-to-door or at house parties. If the product's that good, why can't you buy it somewhere, uh, reputable?
One ex-girlfriend was involved for a short time with something called Vector Marketing. She sold CUTCO knives...one month, she was the number 3 salesperson in Canada. (Didn't take much: I think she sold four sets that month.) I was quite hesitant to endorse this choice of occupation, but the quality of the product spoke for itself--at least, the training manual, from which I could quote at length after seeing a few of her presentations, spoke for itself. These knives purport to be better than Henckels at half the price.
Of course, back in those ancient days, a consumer resource like Google didn't exist. If you Google CUTCO knives, one of the first things you find is this site, which pretty much shreds the training manual, the company, the product, and anything else connected to Vector Marketing.
That's not to say, necessarily, that the products are craptacular. Since it was my fiancee selling these things, people in my family felt some obligation to buy them. Still uneasy despite the glowing presentation, I continually checked in with these family members in the ensuing months and years, especially after the engagement and relationship went up in smoke: was your money well spent? Nobody ever said boo. Did they think boo, and were too polite to say it aloud? No idea. But here's a quick digression to illustrate my point:
My first piano was made by New Scale Williams, Toronto, in 1904. It had glass feet and weighed the better part of a ton. That thing accompanied us through three moves, one of them a real slog down a flight of stairs in freezing rain, and never needed so much as a tuning. Imagine my shock when I read, online, that the quality of that particular model was supposed to be iffy at best.
Even stranger: we owned a black Hyundai Stellar for quite a while. Dubbed the "poor man's rich car", it was made long, long before Hyundai became a paragon of quality. We started to hear horror stories about Stellar not long after we bought the thing. Never had a problem with it.
So it's not beyond the realm of possibility that some individual sets of CUTCO knives are pretty good.
My wife has a fascination with many things television-related, among them infomercials. And damned if I haven't been sucked in to a few of them, especially now that you can actually go to any decent sized mall, find a store called Showcase, and fondle these products yourself.
There are a few items that have particularly caught my eye: the Little Giant Ladder, the Swivel Sweeper, and the Pet Groom Pro. I'm not sure about the reliability or value of any of these things, but they really look good, don't they? Like things that might actually be useful.
Regal went bankrupt a few months back, to my dismay. I've found over the past few years that Regal was the one place I could find a plethora of little products that served a real purpose, stuff traditional retailers didn't bother with. Every time a catalogue landed in our mailbox, I'd be champing at the bit to get a look at it. If only kid Kenny could see me now. He'd probably shake his head in disgust.
So Regal's back and better than ever: among their new, more upscale, and expanded product offering are a number of things "as seen on TV", among them the Swivel Sweeper which was previously only available by shelling out Yankee greenbacks. There's something on nearly every page that passes muster, at least in this house.
Buy! Buy! Buy!
Because, as George Carlin says, a house is nothing but a big pile of stuff with a roof over it.
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