blog好き

Jun 16 2003

Categories: life

6 Comments »

I have never in my life purchased an “As Seen on TV” product. I do own a Pure Moods CD, but I picked that up through an used CD store so Billy Mays didn’t get my money. Amoeba Records did. My friend showed off his George Foreman grill over the weekend, and I was amazed how simple it was to grill a few hamburger patties. I was also startled with all the fat that dripped off them– enough fat to completely fill the “fat-catcher”. It’s supposed to be ez-clean, but with all that fat and grease, I sincerely doubt it. At least with a charcoal grill, the fat drips into the charcoal and the entire device can be flushed with a hose.

Just by watching some of these commercials, I noticed that most products are $19.99 with $5.99 S&H such as Orange Clean (clean with the power of oranges… but if oranges are clean, why do we have to wash them before eating them?) and Space-Saver Garment Bags (basically, a plasic bag that you could have bought at Home Depot for 20 cents). They always have some “special offer if you order now” where they toss in some melon scooper or some other object totally unrelated to what you wanted to buy. It’s a damn conspiracy. I can see some shady marketing school traiing people to sell products at only $19.99.

For people with more money to toss into the flame, there’s exercise equipment like Boxflex, Powerflex, The Crossbow, The Powerbow, etc. You know what I’m talking about– all of their commercials show abs and promise you can lose inches in weeks and how easy it is to store it. They never display the price, even on the small font. Instead, they just say 29% APR. 29% APR?!?! Loan sharks charge less. Hell, MasterCard charges less. The real price is like $600, but you’ll end up paying roughly $3k with interest. The only inches you’ll be losing is your wallet, and the reason you’ll have space to store it is that you’ll have to sell your sofa and TV to pay for the damn thing. You can get better terms making a deal with the devil than through Bowflex.

Then there are the “free” products like Video Professor that’ll send you not 5 but 6 interactive CD-ROMs that can vastly improve your life like Rand McNally’s Maps (which is free at mapquest.com or the more accurate mapblast.com) and The Home Depot DIY CD-ROM (which is basically Home Depot’s catalog on CD format). All of this is free, but you have to pay $7 S&H. Of course, considering that it takes exactly 1 cent to print a CD and 1 buck to send it media mail, they’re pocketing almost 600% profit on this deal. They even mention in the commercial that they are making money because “they hope you will come back for all your computer literacy needs”. BS. They’re ripping you right now with the “free” CDs. If you actually buy stuff from them, please contact me so I can sell you this absolutely free “Guide to Get Free Anime Through BitTorrent”. You’ll get great action shows like Getbackers and not-so-crappy teen dramas like DNAngel. Order now, and I’ll toss in this “Guide to Get Free Semi-Nakkid Anime Babes Delivered To Your Inbox Daily” absolutely free. Just add $10 shiping and handling.

Operators are standing by.