Do you buy any of the latest and greatest products advertised on TV spots or infomercials?
Which ones do you find useful on a regular basis?
Which ones are soon stored away to be used seldom if at all?
I bought one of those button attaching devices (from CVS after its infomercial ran dry) and it perform as promised. It wasn’t super-mega-fantastic, but it did work.
I found in some store or another (VT Country store, I think) that whisk/tongs contraption that the “cooking lady” shows on late night infomercials.
Actually it has now become a part of my regular tool set.
I gave one to the newly apartmented brother as well.
-Butler
I’ve only bought 2 things from the TV and both turned out rather well.
One was a food dehydrator. I only use it for making beef jerky, but it makes dang good beef jerky.
The other was more recent, but I forget the name. It’s a spinnable food storage thingie. It has 3 sizes of plastic containers that nest one on top of the other, with a fourth space for the lids, which fit all 3 sizes of container. It is handy, and has allowed us to do without a lot of tupperware/used butter containers, thereby saving a lot of cabinet space.
I am inherently suspicious, so it takes a lot to get me to try something advertised on TV like this.
My sister got my hubby and me one of these for Christmas; she has one, and loves it. I’m pretty happy with mine, too. Makes it sooo much easier to find the freakin’ lid to the container!
Hubby bought a tool kit that’s supposed to repair or hide dings on your car. He couldn’t get it to work so he gave it to his mechanic son, and he couldn’t work it either. I’ve forgotten what it’s called and we tossed it. I’ll call it the Car No-Dingy Repair Kit.
I’ve only ever bought one item. It was a shoe storage thingy. When it was delivered it was missing several of the necessary parts. I took it back to the warehouse and insisted on getting my money back. I doubt that I’ll ever buy anything again from a TV program.
Flying lures. Tried them a few times and caught nothing. Think I’ll see if they will sell on eBay.
My Dad bought one of those Little Giant ladders (the ones that Al Borlan, aka Richard Karn, does the infomercial for).
It works great, and it does everything you’ve seen it do in the infomercial. Just a bit heavier then your standard extension ladder, perhaps, but I don’t consider that to be a bad thing. When you weigh 275 lbs like I do, you want a sturdy ladder.
In fact, I liked using it so much that I asked my parents to get me one as a Christmas gift. Which they did.
It probably wouldn’t work so well for anyone who has to use ladders on a daily basis, but it’s great for the occasional-use homeowner.
I love “Garden Weasels”. (Bought the first at a hardware store, later ones at garage sales.) They are spoked-rolling-cultivating things. Works very well for me. But the metal doesn’t last long, hence the need to replace.
Blue spongy/ roller mop; best mop ever. They’re just starting to have these on TV again after about ten years of not having them.
Core workout with the exercise ball; good workout, exercise dvd too easy to last long. Harder work-outs are easy to find on ebay.
The old Ginsu knife; the most fabulous knife on the face of the earth. One for outside, one for inside.
The new Ginsu knives; flimsy pieces of crap that rust if you breath near them.
Rubber fingery broom; I’m not sure yet. Doesn’t suck, isn’t great.
Really I’m not usually so easily influenced.
Of course now I wait to purchase most things until they’re at Target or Walgreens.
Staggering array of crap “as seen on TV”
It sucks. The only thing that sucked worse was the $12.95 shipping charge. And did I mention that I got suckered into buying a second one for half price? But guess what - it cost another $12.95 to ship the second one.
So I payed upwards of $45 for two sucky brooms.
In junior high school, for some reason, my best friend and I would laugh continually at these commercials. For some reason they were incredibly funny to us–the stock phrases, the prices that always seemed end in -9.95, and the low-budget production values of the commercials. For instance, this being in the vinyl-LP era, one product advertised was “Record Selector”, which was simply a sort of caddy for holding your LPs upright. It was supposed to make it easy to leaf through your albums for the one you wanted, and there was even something you could do to make it slowly riffle all of them past, one by one, without your having to touch it. Well and good, and it probably serverd a purpose, especially if you didn’t have too many records (like more than two dozen, from appearances). But what made us helpless with laughter was, when the announcer uttered the standard, “How many times as this happened to you?”, as the woman on the screen is looking through a rather disorganized stack of records in her stereo cabinet, and suddenly she reaches towards the back and “spills” all the records out onto the floor. It was so obviously faked.
I never bought any of these things, however.