I can’t think of any product sold through Special TV Offer! that I’ve bought from the advertiser. It always seems like their gadgets, or ones similar to (and often better than) the TV offer stuff are available from stores or less scammy-sounding Internet sellers.
One of my favorite TV products is the strainer built into a pot. You see, it’s virtually impossible to make pasta in a regular pot and pour the cooked spaghetti into a strainer in the sink without spilling it down the drain or even more catastrophically, splashing scalding hot water over yourself and the floor. You must have Strain-A-Pot, or this fantastic device that adds…a built-in mixer!.
Somehow I’ve survived all these years using the ancient method.
I do this with stuff advertised on FB. Even when it’s a “special half-price” offer, it or something very similar is usually available on Amazon for less.
Back when I was in high school I bought some car wax with colored tinting in it, that claimed it would restore faded paint to like new. Maybe something like that might work on paint that’s just a bit faded or oxidized, but on my car the process of applying it just ended up taking off more paint.
I never watch those shows, so I don’t know if this ever was on TV, but about 25 years ago I bought a plastic cover from the “Seen on TV Store” in our mall. It was designed to be put on a plate of food you are microwaving, to prevent splatters.
My wife laughed at it. We’re still using it.
We also got Bell and Howell emergency lights. Very handy when the power goes out. Bright enough to read by, and much better than candles.
We use a disposable paper plate as a microwave cover to prevent splattering. After a half-dozen uses the plate can get oogy-looking, but is still functional.
I’m not prone to buying ASOTV products. But there is one notable exception.
We purchased the Moving Men furniture sliders. Goddamn, those things work! And they work well! We moved some seriously heavy stuff with them, including my 48" stainless steel stove and several too-heavy sofas.
I still have them and will undoubtedly use them again when I have to shift out of my current home.
I’ve purchased Flex Tape before, the stuff that that Phil Silver guy is always enthusiastically yelling about. I had some cheap kayak racks on my old Jeep with foam sleeves on them that started breaking off, so I used some padded foam flex tape to fix them. Didn’t look great-- looked like anything patched up with duct tape, but it worked pretty good.
We bought some contraption that was supposed to make it super easy to remove the shell from hard boiled eggs. It looked like a vertical bellows that you would push down on to pop the egg out of the shell. Even following the cooking instructions to the letter, we were never able to get it to work properly.
I used the paper plate method for years. Then I learned about the plastic plate cover domes.
In addition to containing splatters, they also do some steaming of the food. A reheated plate of mixed whatever for dinner comes out a bunch better. And if you have something goopy on the plate, you won’t end up losing 20% of the sauce to sticking to your paper plate.
I’ve very much anti-gadget in the kitchen. A few basic tools is better than a closet full of gizmos. I prefer the plastic domes over paper towels or paper plates. By far. Here’s one example among thousands: Amazon.com | Nordic Ware Plastic Splatter Microwave Cover.
I don’t think I’ve ever purchased an “as seen on TV” product, but I’ve been gifted several.
Ron Popeill Pasta Maker from an ex- many years ago. Finally donated to a thrift store a this summer. It worked, and I think was actually reasonably well made, it was just much more difficult to use than the infomercial suggested. Following the recommended recipe the pasta came out gummy, and tended to stick together when cooking. I’m sure solvable problems, but “fresh pasta in 3 minutes” was a lie, and even at altitude I could cook dried pasta faster than the whole fresh pasta thing. I still use the pasta spoon that came with it.
Some sort of hamburger press that lets you stuff the burger with cheese or something from my sister-in-law. It mostly works, but the stuffed burgers fall apart pretty easily, are too big, and were not enjoyed. It’s fine for unstuffed burgers, but unless you’re OCD about having perfectly round burgers it doesn’t really save anytime over forming a patty by hand. Plus, I very rarely cook burgers.
A Bacon Wave microwave bacon maker from my Dad. He wants it back, and technically wasn’t a gift. I’ve never used it.
Those microwave hats from my Dad (2\times). Having two of each size is great, and we use them all the time. They don’t work though, because the inside of the microwave is filthy. I expect the problem exists between the keypad and the floor, though.
1 set of a 2-for-1 Ginsu style knife gifted from someone. It was terrible, became a craft knife for the garage, and probably should just be thrown away.
Were the meat claws that Alton Brown hated so much he made a video about it “as seen on TV” items? Received those as a gift. I guess they sort of work, but I shred meat with a hand mixer, and it works fantastic.
That’s all I can think of right now, and is too many for one post. My wife and I proposed a gift détente[1] with the rest of the family, and everyone else unanimously rejected it. I expect to receive more TV products over the years.
Come to think it, I’ve bought several of the Chia Pet-class novelty items for our annual Xmas Yankee Swap. I think they usually get recycled in the next year’s swap.
A bunch of years ago, well before the heyday of Amazon, I was often dicing vegetables. And saw an interesting kitchen gizmo at IIRC K-Mart with the infamous “As seen on TV” logo. I overrode my misgivings and shelled out $5 or 10 for this thing. And thus did the Mighty Slap-Chop ®™ enter my life.
It was a really shitty cheaply made version of something kinda like this modern example: Amazon.com: OXO Good Grips Vegetable Chopper. Put the food in the chamber, whack the knob a time or two, and the many guillotine blades crunch down on the food, dicing it instantly. Or so said the ad copy on the box. They lied.
Didn’t cut well, difficult to clean, impossible to sharpen, and you needed to pre-cut the items small enough to fit into the chamber. Once I’ve used a knife to cut an e.g. onion into 8 segments, may as well keep going to get mostly uniform dice, not load them individually into the Mighty Slap-Chop ®™ where a half-dozen hard whacks would render chunks of every random shape and size. Most of which weren’t quite cut fully apart from their neighbors.
It went in the trash after 2 attempted uses. And thus did the Mighty Slap-Chop ®™ exit my life.
(I was actually a bit surprised to find Amazon selling many versions of a chopper of that basic configuration. It seemed to me back then that even if well-made, it’d still suck at its job. I guess the hope for miracle drudgery-saving kitchen devices springs eternal. I sure wouldn’t buy one of these modern ones.)
I never thought about the streaming aspect, but it makes sense. The cover is bigger than the plate, so you don’t have leakage around the edges, and it also does not compress the food or ride on the highest chunk leaving the others to splatter.
I’ll look for another when this one reaches the end of its life - which at the moment is likely to be long after the end of my life.
back in the day, wasn’t there a late-night commercial from I think Ronco (Ron Popeill?) pushing things like Veg-O-Magic for chopping veggies, an onion chopper (basically a plunger inside cup) and other stuff. Now we have TEMU
It’s Popeil, with one ‘l’. Guy made a fortune advertising and selling crap on TV. First one I remember is the Popeil pocket fisherman, which was invented by his dad, Sam.
The Bell + Howell “socket fan light”. In my detached garage with the heater running it will be 80 degrees near the ceiling (I have a mezzanine) and 50 degrees near the floor where I am working on one of my old cars. A couple of these screwed into the light sockets push the heat down and make it much more comfortable near the floor.
I have a memory of a Popeil infomercial from when I was, maybe early 20s. I don’t know why I was watching it in the first place-- I normally didn’t watch infomercials, and this was for a product I had no need for, since I had a full head of hair: a spray dye that came in a can and somehow sprayed the dye substance in strands so it looked sort of like hair; meant to cover bald spots. It must have been late at night, and there must have been nothing else to watch.
Ron was going to demonstrate it on his own bald spot. He asked his female assistant to hand him a can, and she said “salt and pepper color, right?”. He said “NO! Hand me the black”. Looking skeptical, she handed him the black, he applied it, and it looked really bad, like he was wearing a fuzzy black yarmulke on his head of definitely graying hair. Because of his vanity, it was a total infomercial fail.
I was fairly immune to those ads, with two exceptions.
As a starving grad student, I bought a Veg-O-Matic because every single single-pot recipe we had started out “finely chop an onion/green pepper/two carrots.” It actually worked very well for what we needed. You could assemble a stir fry in about 60 seconds. Sadly, I took it to a church function one evening as were were making a meal jointly and it just disappeared. I did not see another one in the stores and i didn’t have a CC to order one over the telephone.
And I really liked my George Foreman Grill. It made great hamburgers, grilled cheese, tuna, etc., with minimal clean-up. I even used it for frozen waffles.
The Veg-o-Matic and its distinctively corny advertising was so famous that a contemporary comedian made an act spoofing the ads. In the act, he’s selling a device he called the “Kitchen Magic Veg-e-Whiz”. (Spelling approximate; dredged from my ancient memories).
