The world is full of questionable items that people buy anyway. If someone is crazy enough to think it up, you can bet wily marketers somewhere are scheming to make people buy it.
My first brush with a completely useless product was the Squiggle Wiggle Writer back in the 90s, a vibrating pen which I was mesmerised into begging my parents for thanks to Edmund Chen’s very fetching ads on Channel 5.
Here are six other items that give a lot less satisfaction than their price warrants.
Designer bags
Sure, we get that you need to carry your stuff around in a bag and want to look fashionable at the same time. But $5,000++ for a tiny Chanel bag is a hefty pricetag to pay for the only middling satisfaction you get from carrying the bag.
While you might feel rather excited the first few times you carry your new bag out, give it a few weeks or months and you’ll soon be craving a new bag to replace it.
The sad truth is that fashions change. A few years ago, Louis Vuitton’s Speedy bag was considered very chic, but these days the only people carrying them are the aunties who bought fakes from some pasar malam in Malaysia. Not a very good return on your investment if you bought one, methinks.
Killer heels
While the main problem with killer heels, just like their cousin the serial killer, is put out there in its name for all the world to see, few people purchase them remembering that they, or at least their feet, might actually be murdered by this pointy species of footwear.
No matter how stunning a pair of killer heels looks or how well it goes with your outfit, you’re going to end up walking barefoot through puke-filled streets by the end of the night, your heels raw and bleeding and your arches screaming in pain.
3D TV
Whether you’re a TV addict who can’t miss a single episode of Under One Roof (just kidding!) or use your TV set exclusively for pirated DVDs from Malaysia, you’re almost certainly not using the 3D capabilities of your new 3D TV.
Sure, you might have watched the 3D version of Avatar on it once upon a time, but those days are now gone. The same can probably be said for 4K TVs but at least there’s a more conceivable future for 4K content to get produced in the relatively near future as compared to 3D content.
Bread maker
It might have seemed so quaint and so hipsterish to make your own bread each morning using the cute Japanese bread maker the salesperson at Tangs suckered you into buying.
But after two attempts, which resulted in your distributing little Japanese buns to your entire office, your newfound interest fell by the wayside and you reverted to buying sliced bread from the supermarket.
Stationary bicycle
Why anybody would buy a bicycle that can’t go anywhere is beyond me, especially when it often costs more than an actual moving bicycle.
The worst thing is that cycling on a stationary bicycle at home is so boring that most people give up using it after a week and go back to being as sedentary as their new device.
Creative thinking enrichment classes for kids
It makes me hang my head in shame to be Singaporean when I hear of parents sending their kids for creative thinking classes, in hopes that they’ll be able to circumvent the effects of the rigid education system.
Instead of being given the free time and space to actually think creatively, these kids learn how to perform in a classroom environment designed to “assess” how creative they’ve been.
What expensive items have you wasted your money on? Tell us in the comments!