The Worst Things For Sale

I don’t speak Japanese, but Google tells me that the translation for the phrase on this childrens’ shirt, “ケツを食べる”, is “Eat ass.”

Go on, guess what this transparent-skulled baby is for before you go to the listing.

For only $30, you can have a mixed box of pens, printed with random companies’ addresses and slogans. The manufacturer points out that you’ll get “200 to 250 pens” for this price. A box of 144 Bic ballpoint pens costs about twelve bucks, which is 33% cheaper than the misprints.

Do you have your t-shirt celebrating Nashville as the largest-solar-eclipsed city of the southeast United States in the 2017 total solar eclipse?

(If you’re going to stand outside and look at it, BTW, you need some eclipse glasses so you don’t damage your eyes. The ones I linked are cheap and probably more useful than a t-shirt.)

Billed as “a new way to shop with Amazon,” the Treasure Truck texts you once a day asking if you want to buy the single item they have on board. If you do, you meet the truck and get your item. I prefer Amazon Go, the checkout-less store where you simply grab the stuff you want and leave, and where moving too fast may cause you not to be billed for your items at all.

It’s bad enough that you turn this lamp on and off using its dick. It’s worse that one customer reports that he was sold a bootleg, which means that the lamp is popular enough to be bootlegged.

With most of the things we buy, we can pretend that commerce is simply a pathway from supply to demand. We must have food, so we buy spaghetti. We must get to work, so we go to Truck Month. There’s a clear need for a couch, toilet paper, a charging cable, a weed-whacker, a bottle of vitamins. But products like the Bluetooth Fidget Spinner lay bare the reality that everything is simply a game of pushing your buttons to take your money. The spaghetti has been optimized by making the factory operators who run the spaghetti machines operate at the maximum speed, the suppliers for the ingredients are chosen on price differences of a hundredth of a penny per pound, the wording on the box relentlessly A/B-tested to optimize sales versus their competitors’ identical products. Everything is always like this. It’s just more obvious with the Bluetooth Fidget Spinner.