baseball commercials

Aside from the annoying parade of Frank TV ads during these playoffs, I just noticed another one which twitched some actual numbers in my head. A razor blade was advertised as 'a dollar a week on razors, that's money well spent'. There's a major problem with this: It is actually a waste of money. It's entirely possible to re-use the blades for a year or more provided they are dried off after use. The blades wear down because of oxidation from water/soap molecules, not from merely cutting hair follicles. There's even some clever chap who came up with a device that now sells in some pharmacy chains that dries the blades for you (without having to go through some tedious use of a blow dryer or tapping it with a towel in the lazy method). I'm not sure how the disposable razor blade industry somehow convinced people that steel somehow breaks down from cutting hair, but I'm impressed that this is such a profitable marketing angle in spite of metallurgical evidence to the contrary.

Therefore, even buying a single of even those blades for say, 5 bucks, is not 'a dollar a week'. It's 10 cents a week. I realize those extra 45 dollars a year doesn't sound like much, but it's still money being wasted, not money being 'well spent'.