Dear 2,000 Flushes,
I normally don’t write letters like this and it’s not as if I don’t have a life, but small things intrigue me. I went to Milam’s for some groceries and strolled down the household cleaner’s aisle for clothing detergent.
The ability to clean well did not enter the selling equation, The aroma of the product was its selling point. I could select from a number of scents. Marketers appeal to your senses with color of packaging and smell of product. ‘Original’ Gain® is described on the website as the same great scent you fell in love with.
Never mind that they ended a sentence with a preposition, they assume you fell in love with them as well. Does that mean your love life may consist of sensing love through your nose? Dogs do that. Never fear because there’s Island Fresh described as your passport to the tropics, and I’m not making the next part up, without the huge lines, lost luggage and turbulence. Why travel when you’ve got the freshness of palm trees and sunshine all bottled up
The only thing that’s bottled up is America’s credit which isn’t allowing us to make the real trip. If you’ve got the depth of imagination that allows you to take a quick vacation while color sorting the laundry in a small room with no windows and possibly a small child or two, then you’ve got the wherewithal to start your own ad agency and name some of those products.
Let’s not forget Gain’s Fresh Awakenings®. The ad people went over the top with this appellation. Fresh Awakenings is a brilliant name for a detergent, and I figure if my clothes are asleep and I want to revive them, that’s what I would use. The description goes on beckoning you from the closet, drawers, hamper or sheets. If that’s where you hang out, you need more than a scent to open your eyes; you may need some psychological help too.
Doing the laundry with Gain is like tripping through the fruit tree groves with other product descriptions like Mandarin Lime Fusion, Apple Mango Tango and Honey Suckle Guava Groove. I guess they’re not appealing to people with an allergic reaction to fruit.
I continued shopping and That’s when I saw it; a box of 2000 Flushes®. How did they arrive at the name 2000 Flushes? I have an idea, but I got to thinking about the quality control people who actually test the product. Did they really have someone sit in a chair with a calculator next to a toilet and flush it 2000 times to prove their claim? In these days of sue or be sued because somebody didn’t lose weight on a watermelon and hot fudge diet, I can’t imagine any company not going through the effort to justify their advertising. I just couldn’t, but on the other hand to sit there and flush a john 2000 times? I don’t think so.
The duct tape people don’t go around and tape stuff together to see how it holds, although that sounds like more fun than sitting there and flushing the day away. Still, the question was nagging at me and without the ability to call the company directly, I decided to conduct my own consumer test. I figured that our benchmark is the old standard American flush of 3.5 gallons. From an average American’s knowledge of the metric system that would be about 6 to 8 hundred liters.
At 9AM Monday morning I started flushing. It was thrilling to see the water turn bright blue, but that faded by 9:15. Not the water, just the feeling. At noon I took a break for lunch. I thought of what my water bill would look like at the end of the month, but I figured the testing was for the public good. It would have been the same amount on the water bill if I had left the sprinkler on over-night.
Maybe I could enlist someone to cover that cost by publishing my findings. I’ve got 14 people following me on social media. Do you think JD Power and Associates would be interested? Anyway, after lunch I went back to the bathroom. Kathy kept asking what I was doing in there. I yelled back, “Research!” and kept flushing. Honestly, it was starting to get old. They couldn’t pay someone enough to do that sort of job all day every day. It was not a union job.
What could you compare it to, the guy that rings the bell to end the round at the fights? At least there’s more action in the ring! I thought about hiring someone to push the handle, but that might have skewed the results and what if they lost count? I’d be as they say, In the crapper. That night I went to sleep counting blue sheep and dreamed of the Hoover Dam overflowing.
Monday came and went and frankly, so did the whole family and I wasn’t feeling as if I wanted to do this for another day, but feeling Flush with success I plodded on. Tuesday afternoon about 2PM I was up to 1856 flushes and it didn’t look as blue. I was nearing the end of the tablet. Sorry 2000 Flushes, I’m sure the marketing department figured that the name1856 flushes wasn’t as sexy as 2000. And thank you for not making a giant economy size; I’d have been in there all week!
Not soon after, I went back to the market and saw the ‘2,000 Flushes New Spring meadow Fragrance’ the package said it was good for up to 4 months. My guess is someone let my results leak back to the company and they don’t claim a number anymore, just an approximate time. That’s a lot safer for them liability-wise. As I pushed my cart away I felt that I had done my job when right there at the end of the aisle was a display of large hurricane lamps. The sign said they were 1 million candlepower, hmmmm.
