When watching informercials they do a real good job of selling you on a certain product. It looks really neat and you just gotta have it. But when you buy it, it turns out to be crap. Would it be fair to say that all these infomercials selling products “for only 19.95” are just great ways of scamming people out of twenty bucks and not much more?
I have to be honest; on the RARE (2) occasions on which I’ve bought stuff after seeing infomercials, the products were fine. One was a sort of kitchen appliance called a Rocket Chef (my wife ordered it), and she still uses it. The other was a few years back and was for some orange-based cleansers (before these were available in stores). The stuff worked like a charm.
I am always leery of hard sell, no matter what is sold. It’s one thing when a commercial informs you of a product, and another when they sell you something which looks real good, for only $19.95, and throw in something else, and promise to send you two if you “call within the next 15 minutes”. Or “apply until the end of the month if you do not want to miss this great opportunity”.
Give me a break!
Peace
there’s one on right now, for some kind of crap, where “You can get all this for, not FOUR easy payments of nineteen ninety five, but three easy payments of nineteen ninety five”.
great.
jb
I’ve heard good things about the Rocket Chef and also the George Foreman Rotisserie Grill.
Products are advertised with infomercials not because they’re crap, but because the manufacturer has a limited advertising budget. (Of course, often the manufacturer has a limited budget because no one buys their crappy products.)
There are stores, at least in the Northeast part of the country, with the name As Seen On T.V. You find them in larger malls. They pretty much are filled with stuff you see for sale on infomercials.
Me, I love my Tap Lights. PERFECT for when the storms of summer hit, and we lose power. They also let the kids play their *&(#% GameBoys in the car at night without my having to leave the car dome light on. ( I know, there's an accessory for that now). The Tap Lights work exactly as advertised, and were worth the 19.00 for six of em.
Cartooniverse
… Will end up in Wal-Mart or some such and after a little while, usually for a little less than $19.95. Then the copy-cats come out and they turn into real cheap junk.
TV infomercials are just the next generation of the salesman demonstrating his goods on the boardwalk or in a mall.
Sometimes the product being sold is actually as is demonstrated (Gensu knives are an example and it’s beginning to look like Rocket Chef may be another one).
Most often there is a reason the product needs a direct sell. You need to draw yourself away from the demonstration and ask the terribly honest question: “If I took this thing home would I really, really use it?”
Ask yourself this question even before you address the question of whether or not it’s crap.
You gotta be careful about these infomercials. RONCO always introduces new, cheap products that he sells for an astronomical price on TV – like the dehydrator for food at $69.95. So long as sales are good, he doesn’t lower the price. In a year or so, they fall and you pick up his product in Kmart at $29.95.
DD7, the spot removing paste in a tube worked quite well but only on the stuff they showed on TV, not on anything else like they hinted.
That much hyped furniture refinishing kit, where you make junk furniture look like new, even to changing the look of the type of wood, fizzled out fast. I know some people who bought the stuff and the finished work resembled plastic.
There was a foaming paint remover. Spray it on and wait seconds, then just easily scrape off layers and layers of old paint. No more caustic chemicals, no more gloves, no mess, no fuss. Paint just bubbles up. Well, it dropped out of sight and no professional refinisher that I know of ever used it. I suspect it worked only on latex paint.
Tap lights. A friend of mine bought them, after viewing the extensive infomercial, especially after seeing how you can use them to light up walkways and stairwells and in storms. She wanted them to use as soft easily placed night lights in her dark halls. They burned the batteries out within a few hours of being turned on. The advertisements misled her.
Most of the exercise equipment will not give you the bodies of the folks they show using it. The famous ski slider turns out to be difficult to even stand on unless you ski, several other miracle machines have a guy at the end who spews out a blurb that most people cannot actually understand that informs you that results cannot be obtained without other exercises and following a patented diet that comes with the product.
Suson Summers has been promoting exercise gear for years, having managed to piss off the movie industry with her greed and they don’t hire her anymore. Her products again do not do as much as you think they do. You have to be already in great shape to look like the people she has demonstrating the stuff.
If the product has a barker (over eager, over excited person or persons who just rave about the product, one demonstrating, one gushing in astonishment at the results), then the chances are very high that it is crap.
I never got a Ginsu knife to whip through a block of frozen spinach as easily as they did. Consumer Reports had to go through 5 or 6 of those hand blenders before being able to whip a container of low fat milk into a ‘delicious, low calorie frothy topping.’ Professional chefs use a version not easily available to the general public.
Laser knives, those which have those odd vertical cutting edges and never need (or can be) sharpening and cut through anything soon get ‘dull,’ sort of. They start kind of hacking their way through cooked meat, not smoothly slicing like a sharp, smooth ground knife will.
Remember those work lights? High power. Bright yellow. Rectangular heads and bulbs. Great to put anywhere you need light. Some sort of impressive grid over the faces to protect them? They show them being used in houses, in garages, rooms, outside and in work shops. Well, then never mention this, but when you buy them, they come with a big warning sticker that says for outside use only. Seems they give off a whole lot of heat and can become a bit dangerous in a confined area, like shown on TV.
Remember those odd wrenches with a large, enclosed head to fit most bolts, and a moving, pivot mounted handle that extended into the head to lock on the nut, no matter what condition it was in? They worked, but not as easily as shown on TV, were mainly a pain in the butt to use and no professional mechanic that I know of has them. Where once they were $30 for a set of 3, you can buy them at Walmart for around $2 or $3 each. They still are a pain in the butt to use.
Just remember, the people demonstrating the stuff are professionals and they might go through 8 or 10 items before getting 1 to do what they want on TV.
Now, the Juiceman juicer does exactly what it is designed to do, though I consider the price to be too high, unless it has a heck of a powerful and durable motor. On most juicers, the cutter/strainer basket wears out first and getting a replacement is hard and about as expensive as the entire unit. Next, the motor, which is placed under a lot of strain by people shoving root vegetables into the thing, goes.
Most juicers ($29 to $40 range), have a plate in the bottom of the cutter/strainer basket with sharp, raised, angled saw teeth. These shred the produce. After a lot of use, these teeth can dull and force the motor to work harder. You cannot sharpen them.
Cleanup, by the way, on any juicer is a mess. The hardest part is the cutter/strainer basket. Bits of pulp get caught in the screen and you need to use a toothbrush under running water to scrub them out. The machine needs to be wiped down after the juicing assembly is removed for cleaning. It must be cleaned if you’re not going to use it for a few hours because the raw vegetable pulp caught in it goes bad fast.
Not all infomercials are bad or misleading.
I was definitely interested in the way that Oxyclean was used on an infomercial. I ordered it and it worked exactly as advertised. It’s a great all-purpose safe cleaner.
When I called and ordered the Oxyclean, they definitely put the pressure on me to buy more. I explained that I wanted to try it out before I purchased a great quantity.
They also signed me up for this thing called “essentials”, one of those supposed discount programs that start out free and then grow to $50 a month. The discounts were worthless and it was a pain to cancel out of the program.
What gets me though is how many of the infomercials tag on a huge “shipping and handling” charge. They only pay $3 - $4 to mail the item, yet charge you $15!
Many sellers on ebay do the same thing. They recoup their selling and advertising costs by tagging on huge charges.
I get my Oxyclean at Sam’s Club now and get a huge tub for under $15 and no shipping or handling charges.
"informercials’ is one of those special words that you can search here as it’s been talked about a lot.
One thing not mentioned before is that they take all the orders FIRST!..Then they make them based on the number of orders they get. That’s why it takes 4 to 6 weeks to get one, they have to make them.
I found the NADS hair remover actually works well BUT your hair must grow out an inch. If your hairs are different lengths it won’t work. It’ll basically do a top notch job of getting rid of the long hairs leaving you with a bunch of small ones you must shave to get an even smoothe skin.
Thus it grows back uneven.