I’ve been talking (a little too much probably) about the commercial for ShamWow lately. The spokesman for the product is a little too abrasive in my view. He seems to be indicating that we’re all idiots unless we own this product. For the record, the spokesman’s name is Vince Offer. Mr. Offer indicates that we should all buy the ShamWow because we’re going to spend $20 to $30 per month on paper towels. I found that really hard to believe. So I started keeping track of how many paper towels I’ve used over the past two weeks.
I used 11 paper towels over a two week period, which is an average of 0.86 towels per day. Bridgey did not track her towel usage, but she’s in the kitchen much more than me, so I’ll estimate that she uses 10 times more than me. That’s about eight and a half towels per day. That’s a total of (about) 9.4 towels per day which, in a 31 day month, works out to almost 300 paper towels per month. Since we use the half sized paper towels, this amounts to about 150 regular sized paper towels per months. That’s about 2 rolls of Bounty per month. Certainly not $20 to $30 worth.
These are estimates (of course) for our usage. I’d like to do more substantial tracking of the data so I could get some solid numbers on our actual usage. I also realize that our usage is lower because we don’t have kids. Several people with children have pointed out that they likely use $20-$30 a month worth of paper towels. I ran the numbers on that and it works out to about 32 full size paper towels per day on the high price range. (Note: we use the half sized towels in our kitchen because they seem to be used more efficiently.)
I’d encourage anyone reading this to take note of their usage and report back what their totals for towels and price turn out for a month.
On a mildly related note, I checked out Vince Offer’s wikipedia page and found this:
In 1999 (Mr.) Offer released the Underground Comedy Movie to scathing reviews. Lawrence Van Gelder of the New York Times described the movie as “a series of sketches built around subjects like masturbation, defecation, alienation, urination, necrophilia, voyeurism, casual brutality and mockery of the unfortunate.” He added that Offer “makes the common mistake of equating the recognition of comic potential for comedy itself. For the successful, talent bridges the gap, but here it is absent.” DVDs of the film were marketed via television infomercial.
Awesome.
