True confessions time. What have you bought of TV and do you still use it?
I’ll start:
Buckwheat hull pillow, paid $25, off of HSC and I now have six of them. I can’t stand feather pillows anymore. ( The rest were purchased at the local Rite Aid for $10 and they leak hulls.)
A pick up truck bed unloader. About $120. Off of HSC. Worth every penny when unloading mulch or not so heavy landscaping items.
Those are my two biggest infomercial sins.
I bought the microwave potato chip maker. I followed the directions explicity. About half-way through the cooking process the the chips burst into flames, melting the chip-maker. I don’t think it was my fault.
I’ve never personally bought anything off TV (I’m a catalog and mail-order person) but a couple years ago for Xmas, my mother-in-law bought hubby this fishing lure set. Supposed to just wow the fish, etc etc. All sorts of different rubber gadgets to put on the bait etc. Think he used it once and it was such a pain, he hasn’t used it since.
And can it be that in a world so full and busy, the loss
of one weak creature makes a void in any heart, so
wide and deep that nothing but the width and depth
of vast eternity can fill it up!
-Charles Dickens “Dombey and Son”
I still have the hand-hammered wok. No problems with it, works great.
Why did I buy a wok from a scottish guy on TV? I was in college, needed cookware badly, and was really high.
Wow, mine is recent and terribly embarrassing. It’s the Remington Vortex hairdryer. Not as great as it seems in the commercial - they make it look like the air lifts your hair and dries it underneath at the same time?
It does dry my hair quicker than any other dryer I’ve owned.
But I don’t know if it was worth the $25.00 + shipping & handling (don’t ask what the total was).
My excuse: Hubby’s dryer died, he kept borrowing mine, driving me to call the (800) number.
Most common question I ask: “What?”
Most common question I get: “Are you really hearing impaired?”
$25.00 for delivery. Where do you live? For that price they ought bring it to you in a limo.
By the way when I was 6 I bought a Fun Rock Lp cause I like the song “Sugar Sugar.”
I’m glad I’ve never bought anything from a Infomercial. Later when those products show up in stores they never work like in the infomercial.
My wife bought one of those RonCo. food dehydrators several years ago. We still use it fairly often. It works pretty well if you follow the directions. My wife makes the best beef jerky I’ve ever had. And it costs about 95% less than the crap you get in the store.
Markxxx -
Read it again…
$25.00 + shipping & handling…
I’m still not telling you the entire amount that was charged to my credit card.
I ordered some earrings off QVC (is that the right name? i forgot). They are pretty cool. They are hoop earrings, with 8 Christmas charms. I got 2 stars, 2 trees, 2 pointsettia, and 2 pearl ornaments. The quality is excellent. I wear them every year at Christmas time, and I have different earrings each days. Sometimes instead of just wearing one charm on each hoop, i’ll put 2 on. It’s fun and only cost $12.00.
MaryAnn
Sometimes life is so great you just gotta muss up your hair and quack like a duck!
I don’t consider the HSC and QVC etc. as the proverbial “TV-shopping” that is so foolish. They realy aren’t much different than the Sam’s club and Costco stores, buy in bulk and sell for less, except for the annoying host hocking crap they’ve never used before.
The real sin is the late nite infomercial Ronco (or that creepy British guy with the bow tie) type crap. Buying that stuff (remember GLH?) is shameful.
My worst sin is getting caught up in the early wave of commemorative coins. Hey, I was 15 and thought they’d be worth something more than the $5 face value. My mom however is hooked on the QVC and HSC stuff, most of it is plain old brand name goods, but any savings is killed by the shipping and handling.
Secretly I always wanted to buy a Ronco Stud Buster. Remember that? Looking back, I think I would have look like one of Huggy Bears ho’s had my mom let me order it.
I have bought, as a joke gift, but not off TV, a Ginsu knife for a friend. Nearly 10 years later, he says it is still the best knife he’s ever had.
Our friends call us “The InfoCouple”. We have purchased:
Quick and Brite (so far, it’s only worked in cleaning up spills on the new couch, and I used it right after the spill occured)
PVA 10X Mop… works great, but now we live in a house that is entirely carpeted (I hate that) so I have no use for it.
EZ Crunch. Relegated to a closet about 3 weeks after it came.
Total Gym. I love it, but I’m still waiting for a place to put it.
Carlton Sheets Real Estate stuff. Halfway through the first video we decided to send it back.
Some “making money from your home” thing. Came with 8 audio cassettes and 8 workbooks. We had it for 3 years and Byron never once looked at the books or listened to the tapes. I elected to file them under “T” for “Tossable Crap” when I cleaned the office a few months ago. I don’t even think he knows they’re gone.
Static Duster. Awesome.
ButtMaster. Living with the Thighmaster and the EZ Crunch.
ChromaSlim. Peppermint-flavoured gum with chromium added to “increase energy”. It made my jaws hurt, just like regular Wrigley’s.
It’s getting easier to ignore, but I always have to pause when I’m flipping channels and come upon an infomercial.
Veni, Vidi, Visa … I came, I saw, I bought.
I’m ashamed to admit that I bought an oil additive called Slick 50-I was convinced it would make my engine:
(A) 20% more powerful
(B) 10% more MPG
© last till 1,000,000 miles
Well I bought the crap and put it in my engine-did’nt do a damned thing!
I once bought some of that car polish. You know where they put metal filings and acid on the paint…I never tried that, thank god, but boy did the polish suck. It always left swirls that took hours to buff out. The stuff did come with a car wash liquid that was actually really good, but it couldn’t be ordered on its own.
Cincy Microwave radar/laser detector – high quality, great price, but I’ve gotten many more tickets per mile since buying it. Remeber, it’s a radar detector, not a cop detector. 
FTR, the laser traps are so quick that the detector pretty much only tells you, “you are about to get a ticket.”
I bought my home computer system of the T.V. I had a ton of problems with it at the start, and thought I had made a terrible error. They fixed eveyr little thing, and now I have a great computer that I got for a great price.
I bought all that hair-care crap that Cher was hawking about 10 or so years ago. It was perfectly nice, but it kept coming…and coming…and coming. I still have a little bottle of the Anti-Frizz Jizz. I finally figured out how to cancel my subscription. And my hair never did turn out as nice as Cher’s. Of course, mine is fine and blonde. That MIGHT have something to do with it.
I bought the Time-Life Classic Country Music Collection. It haunted me for years with that catchy late-night infomercial full of songs that reminded me of my childhood until I could resist no longer and bought it for an obscene amount of money (considering I have seen it elsewhere since then for about 1/3 the price I paid).
Oh, and about 12 years ago I bought a ThighMaster. I never did get Suzanne Somer’s thighs and it ended up in the back of my closet after about a month.
Is this the actual product name?
If not, it is hilarious and icky all at the same time.
It sounds like calling Ron Jeremy over for a moisturizing hair treatment that makes your hair bounce and behave.