The Worst Things For Sale

Thanks to FitBark, you can now run your dog’s life with the same obsessive, phone-based tracking that you run your own with. You can set health goals for your dog, and, neurotically, compare your dog to similar dogs. Five years ago, you would have been convinced I made this up. Today, it’s not only real, but perhaps not even the worst smart device for dogs: that honor probably goes to Petzi, the $160 box that lets you remotely drop a dog treat out of a hole when you tap a button on your phone.

(Petzi’s competitor, the slightly-more-expensive PetCube, integrates with Alexa, so you can tell Amazon to tell your PetCube to tell your dog he’s a good boy.)

Is a hot dog, technically speaking, a sandwich?

Is ketchup an appropriate condiment for a hot dog?

Leaving aside these two unanswerable questions, the Condiment Gun can be loaded with any viscous condiment, and when the trigger is pulled, it dispenses your ketchup, mustard, mayo, bbq, ranch, or whatever it is you put on your food. Customer reviews are mixed, with some saying it doesn’t work at all, but universally ignoring the fact that using a gun to shoot your food is insane. So is using salt and pepper shakers shaped like shotgun shells, or making ice cubes shaped like handguns. But we’re so far down this path that it’s not entirely clear when or where the cultural slide towards murder even happened, in whole or in part. In the 21st century, you hang your sign that spells out your name using guns, and give it your best thoughts and prayers that tomorrow you won’t be on the wrong end of someone’s condiment gun.

The idea of a grilled-cheese toaster seems appealing, even if you’ve mastered the art of combining bread and cheese in a pan on the stove. Unfortunately, the customer reviews are overwhelmingly negative, with some saying it doesn’t get hot enough to melt the cheese, and others saying that one side burns the bread while the other doesn’t toast at all, or that it arrived physically and functionally broken.

You could buy some toaster bags made of woven fiberglass to make grilled cheese in a normal toaster, if you can’t let go of the idea of toastering a grilled cheese. Or you can roll your cheese-squares up and stick them down into the holes in this Hot Dog Toaster, a countertop device which allows you to push hot dogs and buns down into it to cook them. Nothing is real, everything is permitted.

These bath salts have the fragrance of roast beef, a scent not traditionally associated with bathing or beauty products. It’s supposed to be a prank of some sort, I guess, but on the other hand, there’s apparently a market for bacon-scented mustaches.

New York City is a fantastic and unique place, but I can’t say I’d recommend its smell to anyone. Curiously, the manufacturer describes it as “the scent of … fine department stores and concrete,” which leads me to believe they have never been to the city.

Say what you will about the wine lanyard, but at least that lets you hold your drink on an open loop around your neck, rather than the slipknot of BevTie, the tie that holds beverages.

For centuries, meditation has been an effective technique to focus and calm the mind. Now, it’s been revealed that you actually need this $346.99 chair to meditate. Which sucks, because I thought that you could do it literally anywhere, indoors or out, on the floor, or even the ground.