The dream of a fully automated breakfast dies hard. The time of day we most crave a hearty, nourishing meal coincides with the moment we least feel like doing the work to make one. From Wallace & Gromit to Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, from Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure to Back to the Future III, no other meal has been the subject of so many convoluted contraptions.

The next best thing - one appliance you can use to simultaneously brew your coffee, toast your toast, and fry your bacon and eggs - is currently marketed as a “nostalgic”, “retro” throwback to the 1950s. But when I looked into the story behind it, it turns out it’s a lot newer than that.

Not like Ike

With its midcentury curves and colors - not to mention its brand name - the Nostalgia Classic Retro 3-in-1 Breakfast Station is clearly positioned as a replica of a 1950s appliance. It combines a toaster, a griddle, and a coffee maker into one compact countertop unit, sheathed in aqua with rounded corners.

Retro kitchen appliances have grown in popularity over the last couple of decades, with big brands like Smeg and Frigidaire releasing lines of fridges and stoves heavy on the Jet Age styling. The sub-subcategory of all-in-one breakfast stations has expanded to the point that Good Housekeeping tested 8 different models in 2023, “cooking more than two dozen eggs and toasting nearly 20 pieces of bread and even frying bacon, brewing coffee and even making a few breakfast sandwiches.” All of their top three picks share that retro aesthetic.

A combo breakfast machine certainly seems like it could’ve been a bygone ‘50s thing. It was the era of more convenient living through (over?) engineering, not to mention weird mashups of appliances: refrigerator with a built-in radio, anyone? The postwar/baby boom housing pinch also inspired a lot of space-saving household designs. It would have made a certain sense.

The problem is, I couldn’t find any evidence anything like this breakfast machine was ever mass-produced in the 1950s. Catalogs, print ads, newspaper archives, auction sites: none of them turn up anything even close to an actual vintage breakfast station.

“Does everything except eat the breakfast”

No doubt, some people had ideas for something like this. A 1933 Reuters story datelined Prague reported “A ‘breakfast machine,’ which it is claimed will do everything except eat the breakfast it has prepared, is being advertised by a firm here. The machine can be set to a certain time in the morning.” It even promised to ring a bell to summon the family to the table. Whatever this was, it never made it to market.

I found some creepy AI videos (but I repeat myself) talking about an automatic breakfast machine prototype from the 1950s, allegedly called the Bendix ABM-1. That video refers to magazine coverage at the time, which I was unable to pin down further. Whether that’s real or not, I’m sure a multi-function breakfast maker was an idea that crossed R&D minds at the height of the postwar industrial boom.

And I’m equally sure none of those ideas ever made it to market. Which means nobody could have “nostalgia” for them, or consider them “classics” - at least, not in their ‘50s form. The current retro designs are throwbacks to something that never existed. Doesn’t mean they can’t be well-designed or useful, just that they weren’t actually around in the ‘50s.

But - in one last twist to the story - I found out breakfast stations are actually more than 30 years old, so they’re getting into the vintage category for real. ‘90s vintage, not ‘50s, but still, they’re not brand new. And the source for those struck unexpectedly close to home.

Hammacher & Eggs

Hammacher Schlemmer has been in business since 1848, but really caught the public imagination from the 1930s onward for its mail-order catalog full of innovations and oddities. Some of them were highly useful and became household staples: the first pop-up toaster, Mr. Coffee, the first steam iron, the first answering machine. Others live on in legend for their sheer whimsy, like an automatic sushi roller, a futuristic ‘80s vehicle called the “Tri-Ped”, an enigmatic oracle called the Nothing Box. It pioneered a retail genre that would include The Sharper Image and Brookstone.

The Wake Up to Breakfast machine appeared in Hammacher’s pages in 1994, complete with drip coffeemaker, toaster, and an “egg preparer [that] uses stainless steel cutters to slice the bottoms off two eggs, letting the contents drop, shell-free, onto the mini-frying pan’s non-stick cooking surface,” as a Gannett news story put it.

Hammacher’s breakfast station included a timer and promised to have the entire breakfast done in 10 minutes. How much would it set you back to Wake Up to Breakfast? $400 in 1994 dollars, about $885 today.

As you may know, Hammacher Schlemmer has recently joined Stores.com, which Meh, sponsor of this newsletter, is also part of. My “day job” has involved a lot of working on Hammacher, digging through whatever archives I can find, connecting what we do there today with its 168-year-history. And even I had no idea, when I started this story, that it would lead right back to us.

So the “retro” breakfast stations of today don’t actually have roots in the 1950s kitchen. But in a weird way, they’re connected to a historical legacy that goes back even further, one that even the current stewards of Hammacher Schlemmer are still learning.

Whatever their provenance, the all-in-one breakfast machine looks set to get more popular, as more and more American adults live alone, increasingly in smaller homes and apartments. As for me, I’m still holding out for this one:

I go through breakfast phases, and right now I’m squarely in the “no breakfast at all” version, but if I had a robot to make me a couple fried eggs, toast and hashbrowns I would definitely do that. What’s your breakfast routine, and how’s it changed over the years? Let’s talk in this week’s Shoddy Goods chat.

—Dave (and the rest of Meh)

Catch up on all the latest nostalgia with these previous Shoddy Goods stories:

• TV lamps: the rise and fall of a midcentury original

• One Gap fan is collecting every instore playlist

• I Heart Ihopplebee’s: combo restaurants are back

The recent opening of a joint IHOP-Applebee’s location in upstate New York drew attention from no less an esteemed media outlet than The Guardian. It’s a good piece, about the recent difficulties both casual dining chains have had keeping up with the Chili’ses. “People are happy these restaurants still exist, in the same way they are about a local church,” wrote Adam Gabbatt, “but they don’t actually go that often – also like a local church.”

But while it was funny for him to compare “this very American collaboration” to Alien vs. Predator or Kenan & Kel, I thought it was odd Gabbatt never mentioned the more obvious comparisons: the other amalgamated chain eateries that once fruited the American plain, and may now be fruiting anew.

“Tacos for me and chicken for my son”

The IHOP-Applebee’s fusion is one of the latest iterations of a 30-year-old idea. The first hybrid chain restaurants sprung forth in the mid-’90s, painstakingly genetically engineered by fast-food scientists: Arby’s & Long John Silver’s, Dunkin’ Donuts & Haagen-Dazs, Wendy’s & Tim Horton’s, Carl’s Jr. & Green Burrito, and most widespread, KFC & Taco Bell.

“It’s an interesting blend,” said KFC Vice-President Chuck Rawley in 1995. “Taco Bell has a large day business. KFC is traditionally a dinner business.” A Detroit postal worker named William Gordon pointed to his order to explain the appeal: “This is tacos for me and chicken for my son.”

Catering to multiple times of day and customer tastes from one location - and thus one kitchen, one staff, one rental payment - was the dream. And nobody chased that dream harder, faster, farther than Taco Bell & KFC’s parent company, Tricom Worldwide, soon renamed YUM! Brands.

“Multibranding has the potential to have the biggest unit sales and profit impact in our industry since the advent of the drive-thru window,” said the company in their 2005 annual report. By then, YUM! had opened 3,000 of these locations in every combination its portfolio would allow, often pairing a struggling brand with a successful one, or as with IHOP & Applebee’s, two struggling brands together (hard to imagine Long John Silver’s & A&W did each other much good). Eventually all this interbreeding reached its apogee with KFC, Taco Bell & Pizza Hut all under one roof. Fans of this takeout turducken duly christened it KenTacoHut.

But that was pretty much the peak of the party. The rise of fast-casual dining put pressure on fast food to develop individual brands and the instore experience. Also, there was more profit potential in expanding to China and India than in selling mashed potatoes to Taco Bell customers. By 2009, YUM!’s annual report mentioned “reduced emphasis on multibranding as a US growth strategy.” As of 2023, it appears there was only one KenTacoHut still standing.

Capture the nibbler, the sweet tooth, and the muncher

But if the novelty has worn off for consumers, the inherent advantages of the idea remain tempting. “For our franchisees, the economics are terrific, because in the same size restaurant, you can now program all four dayparts,” says John Peyton, CEO of Dine Brands, in a video aimed at investors in dual Applebee’s and IHOP outlets.

Like a Dr. Moreau melding of happy hour and brunch, a loaded Buffalo chicken omelet is among the “exclusive menu items” available only at co-branded Applebee’s & IHOP restaurants. But for the most part, each restaurant’s menu has been trimmed to the best-sellers. Dine has opened 32 such locations so far, a number they expect to hit 80 by the end of 2026.

GoTo Foods is another dining conglomerate pushing their chips onto the roulette space marked “co-branding”. Their Auntie Anne’s pretzel franchises can be combined with Cinnabon, Carvel ice cream, Jamba Juice, or Schlotzky’s subs. “Capture the morning nibbler, the afternoon sweet tooth, and the late-night muncher, maximizing your sales potential from open to close,” they exhort the bi-branding-curious.

It remains to be seen whether this wave of quick-dining hybrids will be more durable than the KenTacoHut era. It’s certainly not a panacea for otherwise troubled companies. In 2023, FAT Brands launched an aggressive push for co-branded locations, pairing Fatburger with either Round Table Pizza or Buffalo’s Express. But that didn’t help the company stave off bankruptcy. Last week, they announced that longtime CEO Andy Wiederhorn will step aside as part of a deal with creditors who are owed $1.4 billion.

The unanswered question is how many people want to eat somewhere with a split personality. The dark wood pubbiness of Applebee’s makes a jarring contrast with IHOP’s bright linoleum diner vibe, like you’re not exactly in either place. Atmosphere matters in casual dining, and trying to be everything to everyone is a risk. Do people want to be thought of as sales potential to be optimized? If the instore experience isn’t inviting, co-branded restaurants could wind up as the place everyone agrees they don’t want to go.

I always loved that DelTaco had burritos and fries. I think a Burger King / Taco Bell mash-up might be my preferred combo. What two food joints would you smush into one monstrosity, and what would you get there? Let’s hear about it in this week’s Shoddy Goods chat.

—Dave (and the rest of Meh)

These past Shoddy Goods stories cater to all your dayparts:

• Meet the Gap superfan collecting every instore playlist

• Last call at Bahama Breeze

• In search of the cheapest Michelin-starred meal in America

As an American living in Australia, holidays are when I’m reminded that I’m not in the Northern Hemisphere anymore. The transplanted holiday iconography drives the point home. Christmas decorations still sport fake snow even when it’s 90F outside. Halloween pumpkins in the springtime make about as much sense as Easter flowers during fall.

The most notorious transplant is the biggest Easter icon of all: the rabbit. One hemisphere’s symbol of fertility is another hemisphere’s environmental catastrophe, with feral rabbits remaining the most widespread and destructive introduced pest in Australia.

So for the last few decades, conservationists have backed a local contender for the Easter throne: the bilby, a long-eared desert-dweller with impeccable Aussie credentials. And they’ve managed to turn that cultural campaign into real-life protection for this charmingly weird and highly vulnerable marsupial.

Bunnies vs. bilbies

To the American eye, Australia’s full of animals that look like Star Wars creatures, but none more than the bilby. Its long ears are rabbit-ish, but pointy; so is its snout. Stout forelimbs help it burrow into the desert soils, and its tail is almost as long as its body, for swatting away the relentless Australian flies. They’re bigger than I expected, too: males are about the size of a house cat, but chunkier.

It looks a little bit rabbit, a little bit aardvark, a little bit kangaroo, and a little bit rat - but comparisons miss the point. It’s all bilby.

If you’ve fallen in love and want to jump on a plane for some bilby tourism, you’ll probably need tickets to a zoo. Bilbies not only live in the remote Outback, they’re extremely reclusive, staying in their underground burrows by day and only emerging at night. And, with no natural predators, that’s how it stayed for tens of thousands of years, with millions of bilbies spread across 70% of the continent.

Then came European settlement, bringing with it not just people but animals. Foxes, rats, and feral cats preyed on defenseless bilbies. Livestock took over vast tracts of their habitats. But rabbits were by far their worst enemy. A colonist named Thomas Austin had 24 rabbits shipped over from England in 1859 and set them free to roam on his estate, to remind him of home. Today Australian feral rabbits number some 200 million, almost all genetically descended from those original two dozen.

They haven’t been considerate guests. Rabbit overgrazing and crop damage costs the country’s economy $200 million a year, contributes to ecosystem collapse, and puts pressure on vulnerable native animals. Alas, rabbits are wonders of adaptability, evading every attempt to control the population. Their famous fecundity is hard to beat: where a fertile bilby might have eight offspring a year, rabbits can give birth to 40 or 50 bunnies.

All of these pressures mean the bilby is now officially classified as vulnerable nationally and critically endangered in some states. Its range is down to just 15% of the country, and estimates of the wild population are under 10,000.

The Easter Bilby

Easter’s a big deal in Australia; it’s the most important holiday outside the Christmas/New Year season. Both Good Friday and Easter Monday are public holidays, and everybody looks forward to the four-day weekend. But for the Anti-Rabbit Research Foundation of Australia (ARRFA), Easter was a painful reminder of the damage these cottontailed vandals wreak on Australian ecosystems. So in 1991, they launched a campaign to make the bilby the symbol of Australian Easter, sort of the Easter Bunny’s regional manager.

One form this took was legislative. “An environmental menace… [is] revered by children as a cute and cuddly animal while Australia’s own cute and cuddy bilby [is] a threatened species,” said Australian Senator Dan Coulter in 1992, after introducing a bill that would make the Easter Bilby’s status official. It never passed, but even if it had, the ARRFA knew that laws were no match for chocolate. So they started talking to candy companies about making chocolate bilbies - and maybe putting a bit of the proceeds toward saving the bilbies.

The first known chocolate bilbies were made by Melba’s Chocolates in South Australia in 1992. The idea was quickly taken up by local chocolatiers around the country, but the mass-market companies were skeptical, at first. “The Easter Bunny is at the heart of Easter and he’s there to stay,” said a spokesman for Cadbury, the biggest chocolate producer in Australia, in 1999. But even Cadbury eventually got with the program for a while.

Somewhere beyond 1 million chocolate bilbies have been sold since, directly raising substantial money for the likes of the Save the Bilby Fund and Rabbit-Free Australia (the former ARRFA, who own the “Easter Bilby” trademark). Maybe more importantly, this shy, utterly unique animal is now known and valued by millions of Australians who will never see one in the wild.

There’s some reason for optimism. Conservation efforts are reintroducing bilbies into areas where they haven’t been seen wild in decades, and annual censuses have shown bilby population increases for five straight years. Even as corporate backing wavers - Cadbury stopped making chocolate bilbies in 2019, and Darrell Lea only started again in 2022 after an eight-year hiatus - independent chocolatiers still treat the chocolate bilby as a prestige Easter item.

At this point, the very success of the Bilbies Not Bunnies ethos means the bilby doesn’t need chocolate anymore to maintain its place of honor among Australian wildlife. But of course, it doesn’t hurt.

I loved getting chocolate bunnies for Easter but pretty quickly realized even as a kid that the chocolate is usually the worst, waxiest kind, somehow not even worth finishing as a ravenous sugar-fueled kid. Still, I’ve got enough fondness for the memories that I get ‘em for my kid - though I at least try to find a step up from the checkout lane drek. Now I really want to get my kid a chocolate bilby, just to freak him out. What treats do you most fondly remember from the various holidays and occasions you celebrated as a kid? Let’s hear about ‘em in this week’s Shoddy Goods chat.

—Dave (and the rest of Meh)

These old Shoddy Goods stories are guaranteed not to run wild all over your country and eat up all your crops:

• Showbags: a peculiarly Australian retail phenomenon

• VCRs for rent: the can’t-miss ‘80s idea that missed

• One Gap fan’s quest to collect all of their instore playlists

The early days of home-video rental were a free-for-all. I don’t just mean the format wars between VHS and Beta. When my family briefly had a VCR in 1981, we had to rent movies literally from some guy’s basement. Appliance stores soon stepped into the breach, with video rentals as bait to sell VCRs and TVs. Then, in the space of a few years, my neighborhood in St. Louis went from zero dedicated video stores, to a dozen, back down to two.

Into this Wild West village came riding a passel of hungry outfits, each sure they’d figured out how to serve the vast majority of American households who would never be able to afford $1200 for a pricey VCR. All these hopefuls learned an expensive lesson in the risks of betting on today’s technology in tomorrow’s market.

Be kind, don’t rewind

The first commercial VCRs were revolutionary, but freedom from the tyranny of TV scheduling came at a dear price. When the Betamax player was released in 1975, it retailed for $2,295 - almost $14,000 in today’s dollars. Two years later, the more reasonable VHS player debuted at $1,200, still a whopping $6,400 today. Prices didn’t moderate much by the turn of the decade, with either type setting you back a grand or so.

So in 1981, Superscope, a South California electronics company best known for their Marantz audio components, announced Rentabeta. For $12 on weekday nights or $15 on weekends, customers could go into the Rentabeta outlet near them - generally the same hi-fi stores that already stocked Superscope products - and take home a videotape player for the night with the movie of their choice locked inside.

But not just any video tape player. The Rentabeta machine was a rugged blue plastic thing with a handle, like a typewriter case, that weighed some 16 pounds. All the functions except play, pause, and stop were disabled - including rewind. You got one play for your money, and if you missed something, too bad. Rent it again. As for using the Rentabeta player to watch any other tapes? Forget it. You were limited to the 25 or so titles stocked by each outlet.

“The key to this plan is freedom of choice and affordable prices,” said Superscope founder and president Joe Tushinsky, apparently with a straight face. Fifteen bucks for one at-home viewing at a time when an average movie ticket was less than $3 seems like hard math to square - but Tushinsky wasn’t the only one who thought it added up.

(Speaking of adding up, you can add a bunch of outlets and USB ports with this four-pack of wall-taps today at a crazy low price on Meh. Buy a bunch and get our boss off our back!)

“Nobody can catch us”

In 1983, Phoenix-based Portavideo rolled out its own plastic-encased rental player, but without the one-movie, one-viewing restrictions of Rentabeta. “Bring home a Portavideo and Humphrey Bogart… and you can play it again for free,” their ads promised.

“Portavideo will be in every neighborhood in America within 18 months to two years,” the company’s vice-president of marketing, Joe Bowman, told the San Francisco Chronicle in 1983. “Nobody can catch us. We want to be the Hertz of the business, though there’s certainly room for an Avis or two.”

Some of those “Avises” are quoted in the same story, including Rentabeta, whose general manager Howard Siegel says “We will see tremendous growth in the next couple of years.” Meanwhile, a Bay Area company called Movie Machine claimed “We have about 3,500 machines out there now, and we’ve really just started the attack,” in the words of their marketing director, Richard Vigo.

A Rentabeta distributor named Louis Snyder sums it up: “The video explosion is finally reaching the masses through the rental industry. For the first time, we are making the VCR affordable to everybody.”

Problem was, falling VCR retail prices were making it even more affordable to buy one.

“No longer a novelty”

The first basic VCRs under $300 hit the market in 1984, with the average midrange VCR priced around $500, according to the New York Times. “It’s no longer a novelty, something for only the affluent or the videophile,’‘ said Frank McCann, vice president of the RCA Corporation’s consumer electronics division.

Annual VCR sales through the early ‘80s almost doubled from year to year. From the estimated 2% of US households who had a VCR in 1980, that number was 14% by 1984, 33% by 1986, and 62% by 1989.

To compete, VCR rental prices fell, too. Rentabeta and Portavideo each had to maintain a mountain of finicky rental VCRs and fleets of trucks to shuttle units between franchise locations and local service centers. That’s a lot of overhead. Prices could only go so low, and customers could do the math: why spend even $8 for one night with a VCR when you could buy one for $299 and use it every night, plus tape shows off of TV?

The math caught up with them. Rentabeta seems to have fizzled out in 1985, as Superscope dumped its less profitable assets (essentially everything but Marantz). Portavideo held on a few years longer, popping up in video store ads into 1989, but Joe Bowman’s big dreams never came close to reality.

I’m sure there was a moment when renting VCRs seemed like a brilliant idea. Nowadays, we all expect electronics to get cheaper over time, but the VCR was the first mass consumer technology to set that expectation. An old-school generation of hustlers - Superscope’s Tushinsky was born in 1910 - learned the hard way that business doesn’t have a rewind button, either.

We definitely rented a VCR at least once in the 80s. I remember steep fees if you didn’t rewind the movie—unfortunately we didn’t realize you should hit stop and then rewind. So we sat there, holding the rewind button down on our first rental, Yentl, watching as a reversing young Barbra Streisand travels to Easten Europe and starts dressing as a boy.

Do you remember your first home movie rental? How early was your family on getting new tech and electronics? Let’s hear about it in this week’s Shoddy Goods chat.

—Dave (and the rest of Meh)

Now that you’ve enjoyed our new release, cue up one of these past Shoddy Goods stories:

• Will there ever be a new physical media format?

• The ‘80s were brown

• One Gap fan’s quest to collect every instore playlist

“I didn’t know anything about the company,” says Michael Bise, about when he started working at a Dallas-area Gap store in October 1992. He didn’t shop there and wasn’t even particularly interested in clothes. It was just a way to make some money as temporary Christmas help.

He’d wind up staying for 14 years. And eventually Bise would become, without question, the best-known Gap fan in the world thanks to his tireless search to collect every in-store Gap music playlist from his long stint working there. Look out: he’s getting close.

“All this music I didn’t know”

“I listened to gay bar dance music, basically, and Stevie Nicks and Kate Bush,” Bise says, in a soft-spoken, thoughtful voice with just a hint of Texas in it. “Then, working at Gap, I started hearing all this music I didn’t know, music I’d never heard before, and I liked it. I wanted to know what it was so I could go out and buy it for myself.” Bise also did some turntable DJing, so he had a sense of how one song could flow into another to build momentum and create a mood.

At the time, instore music at Gap (like many other retail chains) was provided once a month on four-hour cassettes by a company called AEI Music. The tapes themselves had to be sent back to AEI, but the included paper playlists - supplied so staff could answer customer questions about the music - usually just got thrown away. When Bise asked his manager if he could keep them, a collection was born.

Through the switchover to CDs in 1998, and a new provider, Muzak, in 1999, Bise kept using the playlists to guide his own music collecting, then squirrelling them away in a box. By the time his career took him elsewhere in 2006, he’d have over 150 paper playlists in that box.

Then he lost it. “It was awful,” Bise says. “I just put it out of my mind.” Fourteen years of memories, a musical diary of his life, gone to who knows where.

But the forces of entropy weren’t counting on Bise’s incredible memory - and tenacity. About a year later, he says, “I was at Whataburger, I had one of those big drinks, and this song came on. I said ‘May 1997’.

“I got out my notebook, because I always carry a notebook, and started writing the lyrics down. In 2007 you couldn’t just put the lyrics into Google and get the name, but there was this site called All the Lyrics where you could ask and people would tell you what song it was. It was ‘Hopeless’ by Dionne Farris, from the Love Jones soundtrack.”

“I wanted it all”

Bise jumped onto iTunes and started recreating the monthly playlists from memory, one folder at a time. He’d follow recommended artists and songs to spur his recollections. When he heard a “Gap song” out in the wild, he’d whip out his notebook, capture what details he could, and track down the title and artist back home. But he could almost always pinpoint what month’s playlist it had been part of.

When I mention how eclectic the playlists were, how they could go from Madonna to the Monkees, Bise immediately said “Oh, Monkees, Madonna, I have that. July 1999. ‘Beautiful Stranger’ into ‘Last Train to Clarksville.” He laughed at his own feat of recall and promised “I don’t have my iTunes open.”

Still, there was only so far even Bise’s memory could go, and it wasn’t good enough. “I didn’t want just some of the songs. I wanted it all.” Then a chance discovery reignited the possibility that Bise and his memories could be whole again.

“One day I was looking through this folder I had, full of CDs of unreleased Stevie Nicks songs, and there, in the back: 24 playlists,” he says. “I don’t know why I put them in there, but there they were.”

Those 24 playlists would form the core of his Gap In-Store Playlists blog. Bise knew that across the whole wide Gap-o-sphere, there had to be others like him, employees who had held on to these little mementoes of their time working there. Maybe if he put his playlists on the Internet, he could attract those fellow superfans and rebuild the collection.

He launched the blog on December 31, 2015, and waited. And waited. And then it happened. Over a year later, in January 2017, another playlist collector reached out, the first connection Bise made through the blog. It would be far from the last.

“It was pretty wild”

An entire community has gathered around Bise’s quest. Most of his 64,000 Instagram followers are civilian spectators, just there for the ‘90s and Y2K vibes. Same with those who follow his Gap playlists on Spotify and listen to the original tapes on the Internet Archive.

But a significant cohort have been able to help fill the gaps (sorry, but the pun was inevitable) in his collection. Bise now counts, among his online community, ex-staffers at AEI, Muzak, and Gap corporate who were involved in creating the original lists, and he’s made friends with at least one of the featured artists, R&B legend Jody Watley.

He’s now found most of the holy grails on his list. After years of searching for the playlist from his very first month at the store, October 1992, Bise found it completely by accident when he bought a box of old AEI instore tapes on eBay. “There was a Pottery Barn and Lane Bryant and all these other brands. There was one Gap on the list, August 1993 was in there. Well, in that box was (also) October 1992. It was like magic. It wasn’t on his list. I’d done nothing to get it specifically. It’s uncanny.”

What’s uncanny is that when Bise checked it against the version he’d rebuilt from memory, he had remembered 3/4ths of the songs. “Yeah, it was that close. Now, the order wasn’t perfect. But you can hear in your head what comes next. So the order was really, really close. Yeah, it was pretty wild.”

By his count, Bise has now collected all but 22 of the 168 months from his years there. If anybody out there has old Gap playlists, especially from 2002, 2004, or 2005, hit him up at michaelbise@msn.com.

Bise has also expanded his coverage a bit to feature Gap print ads and commercials, and other stores from the same era, like Banana Republic and Abercrombie & Fitch. When I ask if that’s because he’s into nostalgia of that period, or he’s interested in the ways stores use music to create an atmosphere, he says “a little bit.. But the real reason, the main reason, is I want to complete my collection. All these other brands, more eyes, more people, somebody is gonna get somebody else that’s caught in my net.”

Don’t think that it’s all about the collector mentality, though. Bise’s love for the two things that started it all still comes through. One, of course, is the music. He talks with enthusiasm about how the playlists drew on global dance acts (”Moorcheeba, Mono, and Hooverphonic, those are all GAP staples from ‘98 to 2000, they’re not from the US”) and what makes the Gap sound (”a house influence, a little eerie”). According to Bise, the number one Gap playlist artist is the aforementioned Madonna; another quintessential artist from the heyday was Saint Etienne; and the current act who most fits the bill is Tennis.

His second great love is Gap itself. “I still only wear Gap clothing to this day,” he writes on the blog. “My blood is Gap Blue.” The enthusiasm has been noted by the company, which has collaborated with Bise, and noted by media outlets like Vogue. But all that attention hasn’t turned him into an aspiring influencer. Bise just keeps steadily doing his thing. “I think about an exit strategy,” he says, “and then I think oh, maybe next month that one person would be there who has those playlists.” When he finally gets those last 22, he says, “I’ll leave the website up”, but probably won’t keep posting to Instagram.

The Internet is packed with obsessive fans sharing nostalgic artifacts of bygone pop culture. But Michael Bise is in a league of his own. He’s not only dug into his own very specific rabbit hole for decades now, but he’s invited the rest of the world in. I’m not sure he realizes how much fun his fans are having there.

A couple days a week I work in a co-working space just to get out of the house. One key difference from my normal set-up is muzak-like versions of pop songs, which provide a nice momentary break to stare into space trying to figure out if this truly is a quiet instrumental version of We’re Not Gonna Take It. How good are you at identifying songs you hear in stores and bars? And do you work with music playing, or prefer total silence? Let’s…hear all about it in this week’s Shoddy Goods chat.

—Dave (and the rest of Meh)

Music and commerce make interesting dance partners in these past Shoddy Goods stories:

• Whatever happened to greatest hits albums?

• Cracking open the music trading cards of 1991

• Beatle bars, Rap Snacks, and more music-food crossovers

In 1959, when New York adman George Lois landed the Volkswagen account, he described his task as “selling a Nazi car in a Jewish town.” Lois hoped that enough time had passed since World War II that the Volkswagen could shed the stain of its origins and be taken for what it was, an efficient, high-quality, well-engineered little car.

A decade earlier, a different organization had faced a much more daunting task: luring American tourists to visit Germany itself in the years immediately following the war, while much of the country still lie in rubble and under military occupation. Could there have been a tougher sell in tourism history?

“Cobbled streets and beer-stained inns”

After Germany surrendered in 1945, the nation was broken up into American, British, French, and Soviet occupation zones. By 1947, it was becoming increasingly clear that the Allies were not going to agree on a plan for reuniting Germany. The Soviet zone would effectively become its own country, the German Democratic Republic (usually shortened to GDR or “East Germany”), while the other three zones became the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG, or “West Germany”).

Germany thus became the frontline of the Cold War conflict while the ruins of the last conflict was still smoldering. The US and its allies needed an economic miracle in West Germany to prove their ideological superiority over the Soviets, which meant reviving the FRG’s industries to bring in hard currency - in other words, American dollars.

Just as importantly, the Western bloc needed to normalize West Germany as a regular old country, a member in good standing of the Free World, not least among the American, British, and French people themselves. Remember, this is the country that had started the worst war in human history. Revelations of Nazi atrocities were still coming to light. A million awful memories were all fresh in American minds. How would Germany, of all countries, be rehabilitated?

A first glimpse came in the cover story in the July 21, 1947 issue of Life magazine. “Life Visits ‘Heidelberg High’” was a three-page photo journal following a group of American students currently studying in Heidelberg. This wasn’t the Germany of fanatical kommissars and rumbling tanks, but of “cobbled streets, wine cellars, and beer-stained inns.” The article’s sparse text made no mention of postwar hunger or destruction - Heidelberg had suffered less war damage than most German cities - despite the very visible presence of ruins in its bobbysoxer-in-lederhosen cover shot.

“All of the ultra-modern conveniences and comforts”

That was the first image of Germany that the travel industry would sell, a colorful but non-threatening open-air beer hall. And doing the selling would be the German Central Tourist Association. Authorized by the Allied High Command, they opened German tourism offices in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and Montreal in 1949.

The GCTA’s free magazine, German Review, would develop this “folky, not völkisch” picture of America’s recent opponents with features like “Over the Silvery Slopes” and “Ivory Carving in Odin’s Forest”. Germany’s traditions of high culture were emphasized, too, with features on German painting, music, and ballet. Ad campaigns underscored the point.

The tourist offices also served as a PR agent for Germany as a whole, landing tidbits in US papers with fun facts like the 25 millions pets kept by Germans, “making Germany the world’s most pet-conscious country.” It was all aimed at furthering the image of a safe, benign, friendly, reassuringly normal nation. The, ahem, accomplishments of the previous 20 years were studiously ignored.

But even those Americans ready to forgive, forget, and fly over would have found a Germany still in ruins after the war. A 1950 guidebook advised that “the average traveller will find little enjoyment in its devastated cities and its limited facilities.” Contemporary travel stories consistently mention “heaps of rubble” alongside the castles and museums that were still standing.

Under the occupation, the economy was still being run on a ration system well into the 1950s, with local restaurants off-limits to foreigners. Sanitation could be spotty, too: as late as 1958, US newspapers were warning that “American tourists who plan to visit the Bundes Republik would do well to be cautious in what they eat and where they eat it.”

So another angle taken by the tourist board was to emphasize Germany’s fast modernization. “An up-by-the-bootstraps vigor has built a new nation that now again has all of the ultra-modern conveniences and comforts,” as one ad put it. Berlin, in particular, took center stage in this story as a 24-hour, full-speed-ahead European capital that made Paris and London look stuffy: “the gayest night life in all Europe await you in this sophisticated city.”

Again, the message underlying all of this was that the Germans, so recently our opponents, were now a trustworthy, reliable, and valuable ally. And they were ready to show Americans a good time.

Putting out the wilkommen mat

All in all, the rehabilitation of Germany in the postwar American mind happened remarkably quickly and thoroughly, given how recent and devastating the war was, and how completely Germany had been responsible for starting it. Maybe that was partially thanks to the tens of million of Americans of German descent, with family connections and memories dating back to before the war. The ongoing stationing of US military personnel in West Germany also helped, exposing the country’s ever-more-everyday reality to thousands of young Americans who may not otherwise have traveled abroad.

Whatever role travel may have played in that rehabilitation, it’s definitely been a success for the German travel industry. From zero during the war, annual American visitors grew to 400,000 in 1950 and 900,000 by 1970. Today, some 7 million Americans visit Germany every year, making the US generally one of the country’s top two or three sources for overseas travelers. And it’s been many decades since those travelers needed reminding that there’s more to Germany than its darkest days.

I’ve been to Germany a few times, most recently on a Rhine River cruise that I’d recommend to anyone who’s able. It’s a little surprising how little remnant of the relatively recent WWII there is, and in fact how many centuries-old cathedrals and beer halls are still around, at least where I visited. How about you, ever been to Germany? Let’s hear about it in this week’s Shoddy Goods chat.

—Dave (and the rest of Meh)

These past Shoddy Goods stories combine Old World craftsmanship and Atomic Age energy into an enchanting getaway for the whole family:

• The Scopitones connection: how the mafia brought music videos to America

• Last call at Bahama Breeze: the sun sets on another theme chain

• Why don’t Americans want French cars?

Earlier this month, Darden Restaurants - owners of Olive Garden, LongHorn Steakhouse, Yard House, etc. - announced that it would close its remaining Bahama Breeze locations. Half of the 28 restaurants will permanently shutter on April 5, while the rest will be converted to other Darden properties over the next year or so. If you’ve never experienced Frozen Bahamaritas or Firecracker Shrimp, the sun is setting fast.

I’ve never had the pleasure myself. There weren’t that many Bahama Breeze locations even at the chain’s height, and “mass casual dining with a tropical resort vibe” isn’t something I’d make a special trip to seek out. But as one of the last corporate restaurants to express its theme with distinctively flamboyant buildings, Bahama Breeze’s demise marks an even blander, more austere era in the American commercial landscape. And that’s kind of a bummer.

Save me, Coconut Onion Rings

Darden was going through some turmoil when it opened its first experimental Bahama Breeze location in Orlando in 1996. The company had been spun off from General Mills the previous year after its China Coast chain had collapsed with reported losses of $200 million. Its flagship brand, Red Lobster, had seen several years of rapid expansion suddenly plateau amid rising wholesale seafood prices and a decline in customer satisfaction.

At the time, chain casual dining - in other words, the kind of in-between restaurants that have metal cutlery and cloth napkins and happy hour, but also a nationally standardized menu, often with pictures of the food - was booming. Competition for the family going-out dollar was fierce, and investing slightly more for a more dazzling experience was considered a good investment. The faux-Tuscan villas of Olive Garden and the pseudo-adobe of Chi-Chi’s were cheap knockoffs, to be sure, but brought at least a little whiff of interest to otherwise visually barren oceans of asphalt.

So Darden’s next bet was a fairly novel Caribbean theme. Bahama Breeze packaged that inspiration in such culinary “innovations” as Angel Hair Martinique and Coconut Onion Rings, along with more standard fare redolent of the region’s spice-and-citrus palate. The theme was also reflected in the buildings themselves. Bahama Breeze mimicked the British colonial style of the actual Bahamas, with white walls, red roofs, open verandas, and shutters.

Initially, it worked. Positive local headlines (usually including the word “mon”) for the first few stores soon had lines around the block on Friday nights. Within a couple of years, Darden saw Bahama Breeze as a potential flagship brand for the company. “It is our plan that Bahama Breeze will expand and become the third restaurant company in Darden Restaurants,” said CEO Joe Lee in 1998, putting the tropical newcomer on the same exalted footing as Olive Garden and Red Lobster.

Storm front

That never quite happened. Bahama Breeze peaked at 43 locations in 2014, compared to some 900-plus for Olive Garden at the time, and around 700 for Red Lobster when Darden sold it that same year. It never became a ubiquitous fixture of American suburbia outside of maybe Florida, which strikes me as weird because that seems like the last state that needs a simulated tropical getaway.

It’s not really clear to me why Bahama Breeze stalled out at that point. It had its fans: its Yelp reviews are generally as positive or better than Olive Garden in the same location, and consistently better than Red Lobster. Maybe it’s because of the low culinary profile of Caribbean food in the US. “I could really go for some jerk chicken” just isn’t a widespread enough driver to compete with Italian or Mexican. Or maybe Bahama Breeze just came along too late to sink roots in a crowded market.

30 years isn’t a bad run in the restaurant business, but the death spiral has been tightening for a while now. Bahama Breeze’s profitability wasn’t great, so Darden invested less, so customers noticed a drop in quality and stayed away, which made profitability even worse, and so on. Bahama Breeze sales were down 7% in 2024. “When you start serving frozen proteins at a $30 price point, the customer leaves,” writes marketing analyst Eric F. Gilbert. “This Bahama Breeze closing is a symptom of a larger problem: consumers are tired of overpaying for corporate-grade, reheated meals.”

Same but less different

I’d say the closing is also a symptom of another problem: the increasing homogenization of the built environment, especially in suburban commercial strips. Look, I know the distinctive chain restaurant buildings of the past were as cookie-cutter as any other chains. I know they were pale imitations of their chosen styles. I know, architecturally, even the most elaborate amounted to a few frills on a cheap, basic box.

Problem is, now, even a few frills seems like too much to ask for. It adds to that pervasive feeling that, more and more, customers get the barest minimum for their money, even as everything seems to get more expensive. That brutal math includes the built environment. We’ll take the cheap box and we’ll like it.

I don’t expect the Taj Mahal in every strip mall. But a little imagination, a little personality, a little color: it’s not nothing, especially when you have to drive past it every day. Far cheaper to just slap on your logo and leave that basic box gray and unadorned, except for maybe a few panels of fake stone, and even that is probably on its way out. You just want to unwind with some slushy booze and a mountain of deep-fried appetizers - can’t you get a moment’s peace from the relentless squeeze to take more and give less in return?

If there’s any consolation, it’s that there will be a few dozen empty commercial buildings scattered around the country with airy verandahs, wooden shutters and railings, and little belfries protruding from the roof. As with the likes of Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, and iHOP, old Bahama Breeze locations are about to become hosts to all kinds of ill-fitting businesses. Why does that orthopedic clinic look like somewhere Jack Sparrow would drink? Because it used to be a Bahama Breeze.

I’m fairly sure I’ve never been to a Bahama Breeze. Of the various better-than-fast-food-but-still-chains restaurants out there, I probably went to Olive Garden the most. I mean, those breadsticks were pretty great. How about you? Did your family have a go-to restaurant for not-super-special-occasion-but-not-just-drive-thru?

—Dave (and the rest of Meh)

These past Shoddy Goods stories are breaded with our island-style toasted coconut curry oatmeal, pan-seared in our jerk ginger guava oil, and served with authentic Kokomoan tamarind tequila mayonnaise and a side of mango mahi mahi poppers:

• 50 years of the Big Gulp

• RIP Big Lots… or not

• Where is the cheapest Michelin-star meal in America?

What does it take for a consumer product to enter language as a universally understood idiom? It’s gotta be ubiquitous: people have to know what the literal thing is before they can understand the metaphorical reference to it. It’s gotta be distinctive: it has to serve a function so unique and specific that no other doo-dad will do. And it’s gotta last at least a little while, because crossing over from the marketplace to the dictionary takes some time.

It’s a rare product that can manage it. But the bicycle giant Huffy introduced one in 1949: training wheels. And even as usage of training wheels themselves is vanishing, the idiomatic usage of “training wheels” just keeps on rolling.

“Non-spill easy riding”

“Convertible side wheels form sturdy 4-wheeler for beginners… Safe non-spill easy riding.” That’s from a catalog listing for the Huffy Convertible, the first bike with training wheels. For those of us who grew up with them as an established fact, the idea of needing to explain training wheels is surprising. Surely they’re so obvious everyone gets it, right?

But the Huffy Convertible was something new. Aiming to attract more kids under the age of 6 to cycling, the Convertible was designed to smooth the way from tricycles to legit bikes, with a chain drive, adjustable-height seat and handlebars, and… balancer wheels? Convertible wheels? Stabilizers? Safety training wheels? The name took a few years to standardize into the familiar form.

But training wheels themselves rapidly spread to other Huffy models, then to other companies’ bikes, too. By 1955, there were several Convertible knockoffs in the market with near-identical designs. Training wheels became a standard accessory, included with some new bikes and also sold separately.

So that’s how at least three generations learned to ride a bike. My parents, me, my kids: our first “two-wheeler” bikes were all equipped with training wheels. (Well, my yard-sale special only had one, which I thought was normal at the time.) I feel safe in saying most of the millions of training-wheel riders never really thought twice about whether it was the best way to learn.

“Training wheels are trash”

But someone was thinking about it. In the late 1990s, Rolf Mertens resurrected the “Laufsmachine” (”running machine”), an early bicycle design without pedals, where the seat is low enough for kids to propel themselves with their feet on the ground. His Like-a-Bike brand caught on quickly across Europe, with other balance bike makers joining the market.

The idea is that balance is the hardest part of riding a bike to learn. By starting earlier, in a way that gives kids more control, autonomy, and confidence, they can master balance first and add the relatively trivial skill of pedaling later. That checks out to me: for all the time I spent riding with training wheels, I didn’t really have a feel for how to keep a bike upright until the training wheels came off and it was roll or fall.

By the early 2010’s, the pushbike trend had spread to the United States. I first saw kids riding balance bikes around then, in a part of Seattle full of the kinds of cosmopolitan, nerdy young parents you’d expect to be drawn to all things new, European, and scientific. By then, academic studies were confirming that balance bikes were a more effective and quicker way to teach kids how to ride.

(You know what else is cool and scientific? The Zesty Paws dental bones & supplements for sale today at Meh. Hey, just be thankful I'm not peddling mattresses or Squarespace. Sponsor intrusion over.)

In a thread entitled “Training Wheels are Trash”, Redditor elyesq sums up the current consensus: “If you have a child ready to learn how to ride a bike, the worst thing you can do is put them on a bike with training wheels. Riding with training wheels is very counterintuitive to the skills needed to actually ride a bike.”

There are still plenty of bikes with training wheels out there, but the trend is clear. While kids’ bike sales overall fell by 6% in 2024, balance bike sales were up 3%. Pushbikes are increasingly being adopted by school PE programs. While it may take another generation, the writing is on the wall for training wheels.

Bon Jovi, the IMF, and Skyrim

But the metaphorical sense of “training wheels” is as strong as ever. In print, it first started to be used widely to refer to any kind of early-stage assistance in the 1980s, when the media was staffed by the postwar babies who were the first generation of training-wheel users.

Since then, “training wheels” has been an indispensable idiom across the English-speaking world. It’s been used to describe everything from the music of Bon Jovi (”rock for beginners, with training wheels,” New York Times, 1989) to IMF financial support for Russia (”the training wheels of Western assistance”, Stuart News, 2001), from the tentative early efforts of a new chef (”With training wheels off, each of the dishes had found its soul”, Toronto Globe & Mail, 2002) to the courage video games gave a teenager to come out (”Video games were the queer training wheels I needed”, SBS Australia, 2019).

Whatever its value to velocipedal pedagogy, “training wheels” is just too useful and efficient a phrase to die out in our lifetimes. I’d bet my pushbike that it will ascend to that even rarer class of metaphors that outlives the public’s first-hand familiarity with what it’s referring to. Like carbon copies, Kodak moments, going through the wringer, and not touching that dial, training wheels will be a part of our conversation long after they’re a part of our childhood.

Do you remember learning how to ride a bike? I definitely remember getting the bike for Christmas, and I remember every crash and skinned knee, but I don’t particularly have any memory of the actual presumably wobbly, slow, uncertain first trips down the sidewalk and eventually on the street. Let’s hear your first bike memories in this week’s Shoddy Goods chat.

—Dave (and the rest of Meh)

No helmet or kneepads necessary to ride these past Shoddy Goods stories:

• Thrift stores don’t want your trash

• The maverick adman who added the word “maven” to the English language

• 50 years, a billion gulps: how the Big Gulp changed America

My teenage daughter recently did a big clean-out of her room that was less like housework than an archaeological dig. She weeded out a carload of clutter that’s been in there untouched for years. I looked in the donation pile and while there was plenty of good stuff, there were also things like partially burnt candles, torn-up school folders, and full notebooks - junk that if she didn’t have a use for, nobody would.

So it was time for a lesson about the difference between a generous donation and turning your mess into someone else’s problem. It’s a good impulse to want to keep things out of the landfill. I can understand erring on the side of re-use. But the fact is, there are things that are going to end up in a landfill or recycled anyway. Dumping it on a thrift store and letting them sort it out is the opposite of generous. They have to spend time on sorting it, and spend money on commercial waste disposal.

“Only between 10 and 30 percent of second-hand donations to charity shops are actually resold in store,” writes Oliver Franklin-Wallis, author of Wasteland: The Secret World of Waste and the Urgent Search for a Cleaner Future. “The problem is that, with the onslaught of fast fashion, these donations are too often now another means of trash disposal.” Here’s how to avoid adding to the problem.

NO: Straight-up trash

If it’s opened and consumable, it’s a no-go. No used cosmetics, lotion, toiletries, cleaning products, or, obviously, food. That also goes for things that are consumable in other ways, like lightbulbs, paper towels, and the aforementioned candles and notebooks. Plastic food containers probably aren’t good, either: they retain stains, smells, and germs.

Anything stained is a no, especially the more intimate the stain is. No used mattresses or bedding. No towels or washcloths unless they’re new with the tags still attached. No broken or chipped glass, no matter how cool that mirror’s frame is. If you’d feel outrageously ripped-off paying money for this thing, don’t donate it.

NO: Maybe useful to someone but thrift stores can’t sell it

There might be some life left in these items, but they’re impossible for thrift stores to sell. We’re talking baby equipment like car seats and playpens, which these charities are not set up to make sure are in safe working condition. Same for safety gear like bike helmets and personal protective equipment. There might be other charities in your area that can pass these along to someone in need, or you could check local giveaway groups on social media.

Construction materials, fixtures, large exercise machines, weapons, and tools (especially with sharp blades) are also good candidates for selling or giving away to someone else, but thrift stores can’t do anything with them. Some electronics, too, although chances are that old fax machine and flip phone need to go to the recyclers. Oh, and no thrift store wants fixer-uppers - they don’t have some workshop in the back to bring that broken lamp back to life - but you might find a taker in your community.

TRIPLE HELL NO: Anything vermin-infested

(Trigger warning: EWWWW!) I’m mentioning this story just to show that bad donations can do much more damage than waste a volunteer’s time. Last month, a thrift store volunteer in Daylesford, Victoria, Australia opened a bag of donated items and was immediately set upon by a swarm of mature bed bugs. “She didn’t even get a chance to put her hands in the bag when they ran up her arm,” another volunteer said. “She’s traumatised and has bites everywhere.”

The shop had to destroy most of their stock and pay to have the entire building professionally cleaned, raising fears it might have to go out of business altogether. Locals raised AU$14,000 to keep the shop open, but that’s AU$14,000 that could have been used for something else. Whether the donor was just oblivious, or some horrid little shit with a moronic sense of humor, the effect is just as devastating. Don’t be that guy.

MAYBE: Check the store’s guidelines

There are some variations in what stores will accept. Some take magazines, some don’t. Some love getting furniture donations, others don’t have the floor space. Some will take certain appliances, others won’t. Stores that do take electronics often have age cut-off points. Check the store’s website for their rules, or call them up and ask. There’s no excuse for saying you don’t know.

YES: The good stuff

So then what’s left? The things that someone might conceivably buy. Clean clothes and accessories in good condition. Books and recorded media in good condition. Toys and sports equipment in good condition. (Notice a pattern here?) For kitchen stuff, clean and intact ceramic, metal, and glass items are always sought-after.

“We have a rule of thumb that we like to share with donors ... before they give something to Goodwill, they should ask themselves if the item is something that they would feel comfortable giving to a friend or neighbor,” Brendan Hurley of Goodwill told The TODAY Show. In your heart, you know the answer.

And don’t just leave it outside if the store’s closed

I know, I know, you’re tired of driving around with those bags in your car. You planned this drop-off trip and now you’ll have to change your plans. The store’s donation hours are so inconvenient. You’re trying to be generous, dammit! Who are they to dictate to you? They should be happy to get your castoffs under any circumstances!

Just stop. Doing this is the same as throwing a bag of trash out of your car window. Somebody’s going to have to clean it up, probably the volunteers who mostly staff these organizations. They usually can’t even resell any of it after it’s been left out in the elements. And as commercial entities, thrift stores have to pay for their trash collection and recycling.

Donors “come in at 10:00 p.m. or in the middle of the night or run behind the store and drop off a ripped-up sofa,” said Rolf Halverson of Goodwill to KEPR-TV News. “And that adds weight to our trash. So they put the bill on us instead of them.” Not very generous after all, is it?

In an ironic twist, the same daughter of mine who put together that very mixed donation pile just started a volunteer job sorting donations at a thrift store. If my little lesson didn’t sink in, I’m sure it will soon. And maybe that’s why this issue suddenly feels personal to me: somebody’s son or daughter has to pick through all that stuff. Let’s try to make it easy on ‘em, huh?

Growing up I both donated things to the thrift stores and got school clothes from them. Oddly, not the same ones though - I wasn’t in control enough to know why, but presumably my mom had some distinct criteria for where the good stuff was. And then of course in my late teens and early 20s probably 75% of my ‘new to me’ clothes were found scouring the racks at the local Goodwill.

How about you? Any memories of either donating or getting stuff from thrift stores growing up? Let’s talk about it in this week’s Shoddy Goods chat.

—Dave (and the rest of Meh)

These vintage Shoddy Goods stories are guaranteed in new condition:

• The TV Lamp: rise and fall of a midcentury original

• The vaudeville hoofer who became King Vitaman

• 50 years of the Big Gulp and how it changed the world

OK, I don’t think of myself as that old. So sometimes I’m amazed to remember the survivors of early 20th century showbiz who were still alive and active by the time I was old enough to notice them. When I was a kid, George Burns (born in 1896) was as famous and active as ever, as was Bob Hope (born 1903). A couple of the later, lesser Three Stooges were still alive. And Bette Davis (born 1908) was still batting her famous eyes in the occasional TV movie.

Little did I know one of those echoes of vaudeville was at my breakfast table.

Crunchy is the bowl that wears the crowns

Maybe because it had less sugar than other breakfast cereals, or maybe because it was cheaper, we ate a lot of King Vitaman when I was a kid. This Quaker Oats product was a sort of watered-down Cap’n Crunch, which I guess tells us that in the hierarchy of Cerealland, a Cap’n outranks a King. The yellow-orange pieces were presumably supposed to be crowns but came out looking more like eight-pointed stars.

I was never disappointed or excited to see King Vitaman on the table. It was an adequate, just-above-replacement-level cereal, less bland than Kix or Cheerios but far short of a top-tier champion like Apple Jacks or Golden Grahams.

The most distinctive thing about King Vitaman was the box. Instead of a cartoon character, Quaker went with this human actor in a crown of spoons spray-painted gold, which always seemed a little chintzy even to my undiscriminating kid’s eye. Aside from his age, there was nothing especially regal about him; with his bushy eyebrows and unkempt hair, smiling over a poised spoonful of crunchy yellow chunks, he seemed more goofy than kingly, more friendly than imperious. (His original box was even goofier.)

The Vitamanness of King George

This live-action version of the title character, it turns out, dated from a series of King Vitaman TV commercials that ended when I was too young to remember. Indeed, I wouldn’t be surprised if both box photos were taken at the same commercial shoot in 1972. Incidentally, those TV spots answer another question I’d always had: was it pronounced just like “vitamin”, or with an emphasis on the “man” ending? There’s no ambiguity in the jingle’s repeated refrain of “King VitaMAN!”

The actor’s name was George Mann, and he’d had a fascinating career in show business for some 50 years before he landed this gig. As you can see, King Vitaman did originally have a cartoon mascot on the box like everybody else. But Mann’s amiable portrayal was effective enough to graduate him to permanent mascot.

His place on the cereal box outlasted the commercials, and George Mann himself. The ad campaign came to an end because of Mann’s death in 1977. By then he was so firmly entrenched as the face of King Vitaman that he’d stay on the box for a couple more decades. It may have been his most famous role - but far from his most interesting one.

Mannzapoppin’

In 1926, Mann made his professional entertaining debut as one half of the comedic dance duo Barto and Mann. Their gimmick was the height difference between the 6’6” Mann and his 4’11” partner Dewey Barto. They toured around the country for the next dozen years, eventually settling into a Broadway residency as part of the company for the vaudeville revival show Hellzapoppin’. (By 1938, vaudeville was already old-hat enough to be a nostalgia item.)

Sadly, no film of Barto & Mann performing is currently available online. A 1938 Life magazine spread captures a few stills of a “grotesque dance act” called “Maternity Ward” that the duo did while on Broadway. “Grotesque” is a good description, with the beanpole Mann as a giant baby tormenting the squat Barto. It may have just been too weird for the film version of Hellzapoppin’ a few years later.

Mann would keep acting here and there, but his passion shifted to behind the camera. He had long toted a still camera and a 16mm film camera along on tour, capturing both everyday scenes of Depression-era life and clowning around with famous friends like the Three Stooges. But Mann pursued photography more seriously in the years after World War II, inventing his own 3D stereoscopic photo viewer, and tape playback components that later found their way into the 8-track tape format.

His photos reveal an extraordinary talent. I’m no photography expert, but to me his documentary eye is up there with greats like Walker Evans and Weegee, and his candids of other showbiz stars are an invaluable cultural treasure. Somebody publish a book of George Mann photos and please take my money.

When I pulled a loose string in my memory marked “what was the deal with that King Vitaman guy?”, I had no idea what I would unravel. It just goes to show you that you never know what kind of story some goofball on a cereal box might have to tell.

In our house, I was limited to Cheerios, Total, and the occasional Life, based on some sugar-not-in-the-first-two-ingredients rule. But when Christmas hit, we got tiny boxes of the sugar-iest cereal and I had a week or so of hanging out with Cap’n Crunch, Toucan Sam, and Count Chocula.

What was your go-to cereal growing up? And who were your favorite cereal mascots? Let’s hear about ‘em in this week’s Shoddy Goods chat.

—Dave (and the rest of Meh)

These past Shoddy Goods stories are a nutritious part of a balanced breakfast:

• 50 years of the Big Gulp, the drink that changed America

• How Kellogg’s invented the cereal box as we know it

• Why don’t Americans eat lamb?
  

“Have you gone completely out of your mind? This is insane. No one will want to drink that amount of soda.”

That was the reaction Dennis Potts, a regional merchandising manager for 7-Eleven in Southern California, had to a distributor trying to unload 32-ounce soda cups. But something told him it was worth a try. A retail veteran who’d later become the company’s Vice President of Merchandising, Potts agreed to send a case of the “too damn big” cups to one store in Torrance, California in 1976 as an experiment.

Fifity years later, the results are in. For better or worse, the Big Gulp changed the way a country drinks, looks, and even thinks.

“Overnight, kids were walking around with barrel-sized drinks”

Up until the 1930s, the standard soft-drink size in the US was the 6-ounce bottle set by Coca-Cola. Pepsi first upped the ante with a 12-ounce bottle, touting it with the radio jingle “Pepsi-Cola hits the spot / 12 full ounces, that’s a lot / Twice as much for a nickel, too / Pepsi-Cola is the drink for you.” Big talk for the equivalent of a standard single can of soda today.

Longtime Coke head Robert Woodruff resisted until 1955, when the company finally debuted 10-ounce and 12-ounce bottles of its own. That same year, it partnered with McDonald’s to offer Coke in their restaurants, with a 7-ounce serving as the only option. The next two decades saw serving sizes slowly creep up, with 16-ounce bottles becoming the last word in fizzy decadence.

That consensus blew up with that first wave of 32-ounce cups. The whole shipment (either 500 or 1,000; the story varies) sold out in the first weekend, at 50 cents a cup. By 1978, the Big Gulp was standard across 7-Elevens in Southern California, and by 1980 it was nationwide.

“Overnight, it seemed like kids were walking around with these barrel-sized drinks,” says TV host Katie Puckrik, “and the straw stuck into their face like it was almost an oxygen tank.”

“The most profound, important invention of my life”

So began a soda-bucket arms race. Other convenience chains rolled out their own beverage behemoths, from ARCO’s The Beast to Circle K’s Polar Pop. In fast food, McDonald’s doubled its largest drink size, then bumped it again to 42 ounces by 1994. KFC responded with its 64-ounce Mega Jug. The 32-ounce Biggie at Wendy’s was demoted to medium in 2006 when it was superseded by a 42-ounce size.

But 7-Eleven was not to be outdone. I remember seeing my first Super Big Gulp in 1986 and being thunderstruck by that feeling of wonder and disquiet that prairie-dwellers must have felt seeing the first railroad. Has humanity gone too far? But that 44-ouncer was dwarfed just a few years later by the 64-ounce Double Gulp. Then, in 2006, came the Team Gulp, which mocked both its puny predecessors and the human spirit at a staggering 128 ounces.

The Big Gulp became a liquid symbol for the abundance or excess of America, sometimes both at once. “The most profound, important invention of my life: the Big Gulp,” muses Winona Ryder’s character on a date with Ben Stiller’s character in the 1994 Gen-Xploitation time capsule Reality Bites. “You get one in the morning, you have your essential vitamins and nutrients for the entire day,” she continues, tongue firmly in cheek and Big Gulp clearly in hand to give 7-Eleven value for their product-placement dollar. The layers of irony stack up like a dispenser full of Big Gulp cups.

Alas, the gulps weren’t the only thing getting bigger. Obesity and diabetes epidemics put sugar-laden sodas in the crosshairs of public health activists, culminating in New York City’s failed 2013 attempt to regulate soda sizes and various “soda taxes” around the country. Most soda-dispensing chains have voluntarily backed off a bit from the Peak Gulp era. But the appeal of a gigunda bucket of cold, effervescent sweetness hasn’t lost its fizz.

A few cents’ worth of corn syrup

I get it. I grew up working-class. More stuff for less money was always and unequivocally a good thing - especially a luxury item like name-brand fountain soda. I have personally accounted for more than my per-capita share of the billions of Big Gulps (and knockoffs) sold in the last 50 years, and I will no doubt Gulp again.

There’s also no denying the Big Gulp kicked off the exploding portion sizes and “always be eating and drinking” mentality that have wreaked such havoc on American health. Clinical evidence is overwhelming that excessive consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages (SSBs) is a major risk factor in diabetes, obesity, and other health concerns. And no product did more to increase that consumption than the Big Gulp.

Optimistically, maybe our species is just still learning to adjust to the widespread availability of cheap calories. SSB consumption is already trending down.

One thing you can say for the Big Gulp is that it did expose how rock-bottom cheap fountain soda actually is: just a few cents’ worth of water and corn syrup. That’s why fast-food chains eventually said “screw it” and introduced all-you-can-drink free refills. The human body simply cannot drink enough fountain soda to make free refills unprofitable - believe me, I’ve tried.

As it turns 50, the Big Gulp is as American as Las Vegas. It’s excessive, it’s accessible, it’s tacky, it’s hard to resist, it’s bad for you, sometimes it’s exactly what you want, and it isn’t going anywhere.

I’m solidly a Coke Zero guy, and I drink 2-3 cans a day, depending on lunch. That’s after a couple cups of coffee in the morning. I’d say that’s been fairly steady my whole adult life, though with the necessary switch to zero-calorie around the Great Metabolism Slowdown of your mid-30s.

What’s your soda habit like, and how has it changed over time?

—Dave (and the rest of Meh)

America loves the crisp, cool refreshment of these past Shoddy Goods stories:

• Where are the sugar-free candy bars?

• The most-hated candy and how it got that way

• Why don’t Americans eat lamb?

As I’ve written before, Australian life isn’t drastically different from life in the USA… until it is. Like when you have to slow down because the road is covered in cockatoos, or you’re surprised by what everyone does after they sing “Happy Birthday”, or lamb is on the menu for dinner. And lunch. And sometimes breakfast.

Australia and New Zealand are famously sheep-happy nations, so I shouldn’t have been surprised. But I’d never had lamb in my life, or even been anywhere it was being served. It seemed like something people used to eat: I could imagine June Cleaver buying a leg of lamb at the grocery store more easily than I could imagine my mom serving one up.

How did two countries with such similar cultural roots and current lifestyles reach such different conclusions about one of humanity’s basic meats?

Blip blip black sheep

Turns out it’s not just me: by global standards, Americans eat hardly any lamb (and its grown-up version, mutton), and Aussies eat heaps of it. The OECD average for per-capita sheep meat consumption in 2024 was 2.4 pounds a year. In Australia, it’s 16.3 pounds, while in the USA, it’s 0.88 pounds. Compared to the 100 pounds of chicken, 60 pounds of beef, and 50 pounds of pork the average American eats annually, lamb is a blip.

If anything, that 0.88-pound average overstates lamb’s popularity in America, because consumption tends to be concentrated in immigrant communities from sheep-eating countries. One study found that 50% of Americans have never tried lamb even once, and most of those who eat it only do so once a year, at Easter. “The Northeast, with its high concentrations of Middle Eastern, Caribbean, and African consumers, is a major market for lamb products,” says the US Department of Agriculture. “The typical lamb consumer is an older, relatively well-established ethnic individual who lives in a metropolitan area.”

My sense that lamb used to be more popular in the United States is also borne out by the numbers. In 1960, the average American ate 5 pounds of lamb a year. It’s never been one of the most popular meats in America: a 1924 Better Homes & Gardens article observed that “few housewives are acquainted with [lamb] cuts other than the leg and ribs. There is no well-founded reason for this unpopularity.” But lamb was in the mix far beyond where it is today.

Not a matter of taste

The various theories for how this came to be range from the inherent and personal - Americans just don’t like the taste, lambs are too cute to eat, etc. - to the external and macroeconomic, citing climates, lifestyle patterns, and the livestock industry.

The subjective ones are easier to shrug off. It’s true that lamb has a strong, distinctive taste. Trying to describe flavors is like trying to paint grammar: the oft-cited “gamey” isn’t exactly right. “Earthier” is closer but still not it, exactly. Lamb has a, let’s say, robust flavor that takes some getting used to if you didn’t grow up with it. But there’s no reason to think that Americans and Australians (or Greeks, or Turks, etc.) are so biologically different that one can love lamb and the other can only hate it. There is no known “cilantro gene” for lamb.

One variant of that theory says that American soldiers in either World War I or World War II were subjected to so much low-grade canned mutton that they rebelled against the idea of eating sheep ever again. But this extensive Wikipedia article on US military rations only mentions one “experimental” mutton ration that was quickly discontinued. The other rations cited as widely loathed, like beef hash and ham with lima beans, didn’t hurt those meats’ popularity.

As for lambs being cute, I tend to think that first we decide which animals are for eating, then which animals are for cuddling. Cows and pigs can be pretty darn cute, too, and we eat plenty of those. But I’ll allow that the fact that meat lambs are killed when they’re under a year old probably hasn’t helped, in the same way that US veal consumption has all but collapsed. Then again, that doesn’t explain Americans’ disinterest in mutton, made from adult sheep.

All in all, I’m skeptical of subjective, “it’s a matter of taste” explanations for large-scale consumption anomalies like the absence of sheep from the American table.

Cow vs. sheep

One reason often cited for the difference between the US and Australia is that the latter’s climate and land is just more suited for raising sheep. Again, it doesn’t quite hold up: both countries have vast swathes of the semi-arid grassland where sheep thrive. That’s why there were some 45 million sheep in the US in 1867, rising to a peak of 56.2 million in 1942, before declining to something like 5 million today.

But meat wasn’t behind the raising of all those sheep. The wool was the main attraction. For a long time, the sheep meat industry in the US was a sideshow to the much bigger wool industry. Every spring, herders culled unneeded young male sheep by sending them to slaughterhouses, but the real money was in wool - until synthetic fibers came along after World War II. Wool prices collapsed, and thus so did the profitability of sheep.

That was enough to tip the economics of pasture animals decisively toward cows. “There were cattle producers and sheep producers side by side in most areas,” economic historian P.J. Hill, who grew up on a sheep ranch in Montana, said in 1993. “Very seldom was it the rule that either cattle or sheep dominated. But it doesn’t take tremendous shifts in either input or output prices to shift production from one to the other.”

Of course, nothing succeeds like success. Once the beef industry started to get the upper hand on its pastoral rival, it parlayed that strength into further advantages, from friendlier federal grazing regulations to promoting beef as a quintessential part of American culture.

Pasture prime

Sad to say, the loyalty of some ethnic communities to lamb didn’t help its acceptance in the wider US market. “Sheep also came to be seen as a meat for immigrants, particularly those from southern and eastern Europe, who were America’s most reliable lamb eaters,” writes economic history professor Iker Saitua. “American Indian tribes, particularly in Navajo country, also embraced lamb. These social and ethnic associations with sheep meat cemented its outsider status. Meanwhile, the meatpacking industry promoted beef as quintessentially American.”

Sheep meat started a downward spiral where low supply meant higher prices, which lowered demand, which led to even lower supply, and so on. In the postwar years, the USA was a net exporter of sheep meat. Now over half of lamb consumed in America is imported from Australia and New Zealand, which only adds to the price.

If you’re an immigrant and a food is essential to your culture, you’ll pay whatever it costs. I don’t want to tell you what I’ve paid for an imported can of Libby’s pumpkin around Thanksgiving. But high lamb prices mean it’s likely to remain a specialized taste. Who wants to gamble a premium price on a weird meat you’ve never had before, possibly shipped from around the world, when you could just buy reliably delicious steak raised in the next county?

So despite the wishful optimism of the American Lamb Board, lamb is probably long past the point of no return in America. Its economically driven decline has hardened into “a social sense of rejection toward sheep meat,” as Saitua puts it, that just doesn’t exist in Australia. Chalk it up to one more little difference between my two countries… anybody want to trade some lamb for a can of pumpkin?

I just passed my 35th year of being vegetarian, but I do think I ate lamb once or twice…around Easter, maybe? It is weird it’s just disappeared. I’ve always wondered what happened to people eating a goose for the holidays as well.

How about you, ever had lamb? Alligator? Octopus? Frog’s legs? Or if you’re vegetarian, any unusual vegetables? Let’s talk weird food in this week’s Shoddy Good chat.

—Dave (and the rest of Meh)

These past Shoddy Goods stories are a low-fat, zero-cholesterol, cage-free alternative to eating food:

• From Mandela to Nixon, how the Dictabelt captured the sound of history

• The peculiarly Australian phenomenon of the showbag

• 3D-printed food is normal, actually

As soon as people could record sound, we started using it to dictate business communication. The company that became Dictaphone was founded in 1881 by a guy you may have heard of named Alexander Graham Bell. For decades, dictation was saved to wax cylinders and lacquer discs; later it moved on to magnetic tape and today’s digital voice memos. But for a time in between, from about 1950 to 1980, the most popular dictation medium was a flexible loop of thermoplastic called the Dictabelt.

As befit its workaday purpose, the Dictabelt was meant to be ephemeral, a temporary stop between a business executive’s mind and a typist’s hands on its way to paper, where real business was done. So when it turned out that this cheap and literally flimsy recording medium captured some of the most important historical events of its time, only some heroic restoration efforts kept those sounds from fading away.

“Link between minds”

“They’re unbreakable, nonerasable, feather-light.” So ran the copy for the Dictaphone Dictabelt in a 1956 print ad campaign. The contrast with bulky, brittle, awkward cylinders and discs is as clear as the Dictabelt itself. Here was a new, streamlined, brightly colored medium suitable for the go-getters of the Jet Age: “a simple, fast, efficient link between minds,” as another ad put it.

Dictaphone’s wax-cylinder recorders had been so successful it was starting to feel the Kool-Aid/Kleenex effect of becoming a genericized synonym for dictation machines. But in the years after World War II, the company suddenly found itself facing stiff competition from new recorders that cut plastic discs, like the SoundScriber and the Edison Voicewriter. So a lightbulb went off for the smart people at Dictaphone HQ.

Taking advantage of advances in plastics, Dictaphone released the new Time-Master recorder in 1947, with a blunt stylus that impressed a playable groove into a flexible loop of colorful plastic. About 3.5 inches across and 12 inches in diameter, each loop - first called the Memobelt, then the Dictabelt - could hold 15 minutes of hi-fi recording or 30 minutes at slower, lower fidelity.

Once again, Dictaphone had read its audience correctly. Within a few years, the Dictabelt became standard in offices and government agencies across the US and UK, and increasingly around the world.

From Twilight Zone to grassy knoll

The Dictaphone Time-Master, with its lightweight Dictabelts, was cutting-edge technology at the time, and society’s movers and shakers took notice. My personal hero Rod Serling left behind over 1,100 Dictabelts of him dictating his screenplays for The Twilight Zone and Night Gallery. Bing Crosby was a prolific Dictabelter, with private recordings from his archives forming the core of a 2014 PBS American Masters documentary.

In an even higher echelon, at least four US Presidents - Eisenhower, Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Nixon - used them not just for voice memos, but to secretly record Oval Office conversations. From mundane office chit-chat to key decisions around Vietnam and Watergate, it’s all there. Remember all those blockbuster revelations of unearthed presidential “tapes” that kept hitting the news back in the late ‘90s and early 2000s? They were usually talking about Dictabelts.

The best-known, most closely studied Dictabelt of all time also has a presidential connection, albeit a tragic one: a 5.5-minute Dictabelt recording of Dallas police radio traffic from the morning of John F. Kennedy’s assassination.

Some have interpreted gunshot-like sounds on the recording as evidence of a second shooter, with a different gun, in a different location than Lee Harvey Oswald. In 1978, the House Select Committee on Assassinations thought enough of the evidence to conclude there was a “high probability” of multiple shooters. But of course, other, equally credentialed analysts have reached contrary conclusions. It’s far beyond me to litigate the claims; if you want to fall down that rabbit hole, it’s easy to find elsewhere. The point is, the Dictabelt went places that Dictaphone couldn’t have imagined.

“The ideal of a free society”

In 1994, another trove of historic Dictabelts emerged from an unlikely place: post-apartheid South Africa. In the 1964 “Rivonia trial” that sent him to prison, Nelson Mandela had delivered a three-hour opening argument whose final words had become a famous rallying cry: “I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.”

The trial had been recorded on a Dictaphone Time-Master, with the Dictabelts then filed away by the apartheid government. When that regime finally fell, and Mandela was freed, the archives were opened to reveal some 591 rapidly decaying Dictabelts, some red, some blue. Equipment to play them on was hard to come by, let alone to restore the brittle, creased vinyl loops to playable condition.

The seven on which Mandela spoke were digitized in 2001 with help from the British Library and an unusual additional appliance. “To avoid the Dictabelts splitting and to flatten out the creases which had set over the years, the whole machine, with its Dictabelt, needed to be operated at an elevated temperature,” writes Liz Tuddenham. “The heat was provided by standing the Dictaphone on an industrial hotplate.” Look, it was 2001, they did their best.

The remaining Rivonia trial Dictabelts weren’t digitized until 2016-2017 by audio restoration expert Henri Chamoux of the French Institut national de l’audiovisuel, who had a few choice words for his British predecessors and their hotplate: “two of these seven dictabelts, perhaps due to these manipulations, are damaged: they bear severe scratches not found in the rest of the collection.”

Cross-Channel rivalry aside, Chamoux used his own invention, the Archeophone, to play the belts on a cylinder instead of across two rollers. He was able to adjust the diameter of the cylinder to subtly increase the tension on the belt and smooth out the creases during playback. Sometimes, for a particularly rough patch, he’d play the belt backward, then digitally reverse it. Chamoux estimates it took him 1600 hours to digitize the 256 hours of Dictabelts from the Rivonia trial - basically, a year of full-time work.

For whom the belt tolls

If it takes that much effort to restore recordings from a key event in the history of a nation, imagine all the other interesting Dictabelt audio currently rotting away around the world, never to be restored.

The rise of magnetic tape, first on reels then on cassettes, spelled doom for the Dictabelt. They declined through the ‘70s until they were finally discontinued in 1980. Nobody cared much about preserving those now-useless Dictaphone Time Master machines, so even the Dictabelts that were saved weren’t playable on anything.

But maybe the bright spot is that those Dictabelts that have been digitized are now safer from not just physical decay but the ebb and flow of proprietary, device-specific formats. This is why I’m thankful that the old idea of a decentralized, open Internet is still hanging on despite the monopolies gobbling up so much of it, and thankful for the efforts of a million anonymous archival obsessives who make this newsletter possible. Which reminds me, it’s a good time to make my little annual donation to archive.org.

Do you have any recordings from back when you were a kid? I’ve got an old cassette tape labeled “mom and son reading poems for Idelia” that I need to find a way to get a digital copy of, but that’s about it. I can’t imagine what it’ll be like for kids these days who have hundreds of hours documenting their childhood. Let’s talk about it in this week’s Shoddy Goods chat.

—Dave (and the rest of Meh)

These past Shoddy Goods stories are even more flexible and lightweight, and sure to win the Baxter account:

• Tired of always being reachable? It started with pagers

• A calculator for women, for some reason

• There will never be another new physical media format (probably)

I’m Jason Toon, and I don’t really get drunk anymore - not because I’m a paragon of virtue but because I can’t take hangovers at my age. For this Shoddy Goods, the newsletter from Meh about consumer culture, I look into the most oft-cited miracle cure for the brown-bottle flu…

Ah, the dawning of a new year. A time of hope. A time of renewal. A time of brain-hammering, gut-scouring, soul-shredding hangovers.

Somewhere between the tears and the vomit, you may have woozily wondered about those IV-injection hangover cures. Maybe your friend’s brother was a medic in the Army, and they did it all the time. Maybe your cousin swears by them after a wild bachelorette weekend in Vegas. Maybe you’re ready to stop messing around with Gatorade and bananas and get intravenous.

Can it really be that easy? Is a hangover-free morning just an injection away?

The IV league

Chances are you’ve got a lot of choices nearby, wherever you live. Hangover IV clinics aren’t just for the Vegas Strip and Beverly Hills anymore. Nobody knows exactly how many have popped up in the decade or so since the first ones appeared, because they’re part of this unregulated gray area of “med spas.”

Wrapping themselves in medical-ish trappings but stopping just shy of making verifiable health claims, many med spas offer a range of IV services, of which hangover relief is just one. If you’ve been unaware of designer IV treatments becoming a thing with so-called “wellness” and “beauty” and “fitness” influencers, I’m sorry to be the reason you know that now.

Estimates of the industry as a whole point to about 9,000 med spas in the US, turning over about $15 billion a year. If hangover IV represents a small fraction of that total, it’s still not chump change. The point is, any decent-sized metro area will have a range of options, from upscale Zen-drenched “IV lounges” to rough-and-ready needles-on-wheels outfits consisting of little more than a van and a bag of medical supplies.

Yes, unlike real doctors, many hangover IV providers make house calls. You can even throw an IV party with the likes of the national chain Drip Hydration, who’ll come out to your shindig like they’re magicians or strippers. “Drip Hydration can set up a dedicated recovery room with a stationed nurse at your bachelorette or bachelor party,” they promise. “We can have several IVs going at the same time so that your guests can keep socializing while enjoying the benefits of treatment.” Seems a little grim to me, but then some people like grim.

Getting pricked might not be easy, especially at peak times like New Year’s Day. Pretty much every service recommends booking in advance, which makes sense when you know you’ll be getting hammered. If you’re dealing with the morning after an impromptu session that got out of hand, though, it’s more of a crapshoot.

And then there’s the price. $150-$300 seems to be the rough range for a post-hangover IV drip, with add-ons like headache relief and anti-nausea medication often available at an additional price. Got a wedding or a court date? Maybe that’s money well spent. Moaning on the couch through an otherwise lazy Sunday? Maybe not.

“Miracle” or “marginally better”?

Of course, whether the cure is “worth it” also depends on how well it works. First, there’s no one approved hangover treatment. Every provider mixes up their own cocktail, which may or may not contain a bunch of B vitamins; minerals like magnesium, potassium, and zinc; and the aforementioned painkillers and anti-nausea drugs.

What IV hydration is undeniably good for is fast hydration and nutrition. The bloodstream shortcut gets those electrolytes and minerals pumped up in short order compared to oral ingestion. And if your digestive system is so rekt you can’t even keep PediaLyte down, that’s not an issue with an IV.

But not every symptom of a hangover is dehydration’s fault. Your body still has to break all that alcohol down into, basically, poisons like acetaldehyde and formaldehyde before they’re excreted or diluted out of your system. Individuals respond differently to those substances based on their personal genetics.

Different treatments and different people mean different opinions on the efficacy of hangover IV drips. A look through some Reddit threads runs the gamut:

• “Helped a bit with the hangover but a Gatorade and green smoothie with eggs would have had same effect.” (Time_Trade_9774)

• “I’ve done it multiple times and it’s amazing every time.” (I_need_more_juice)

• “I feel marginally better but def not worth the price.” (Due-Muffin4912)

• “I’ve never had any remedy that was as good as [an IV], other than abstinence of course.” (WandreTheGiant)

• “Feeling really bloated, constipated, stomach hurts more than the hangover, instantly felt tired (took naps), slowly drinking water. We think it might have been the Glutathione.” (GladePlugins)

• “Went to a conference in Vegas ten years or so ago... decided we were going to blow off some major steam. Those IVs were miracles.” (photogypsy)

Mishaps aside, a professionally administered IV infusion will almost certainly help some. Beyond that, you’re basically betting a couple-few hundred bucks that your genes and that med spa’s particular cocktail team up to put you into that “miracle” category. Even the industry’s own figures cite a 75% success rate - not a bad bet but not a sure thing, either.

Alas, we’re left once again with that truth none of us particularly wants to hear: the most effective hangover cure remains not getting a hangover in the first place.

I do get annoyed when I have a hangover after just a glass and a half of red wine, but I think I’ll stick to a simple water and pasta day-after routine for my ‘cure’. How about you? If you drink, do you get hangovers? Have any miracle advice other than, you know, not drinking? Let’s hear ‘em in this week’s Shoddy Goods chat.

—Dave (and the rest of Meh)

You can consume as many of these Shoddy Goods stories as you want, without hating yourself in the morning:

• Why isn’t alcohol-free beer cheaper than the real stuff?

• In search of America’s cheapest Michelin-starred meal

• I tried vaping before anybody else you know (probably)

Will you and your family wake up in matching pajamas on Christmas morning? It’s a thing these days, a kitschy, silly way to heighten the sense of occasion. Like all uniforms (but more fun), they make the people who wear them feel closer together. It’s also an easy way to fill a gift slot for everyone in the family, not a trivial concern for busy parents.

So, when and where did this all get started? And how “traditional” is it, really?

The ‘50s: “Close Harmony”

Matching pajamas for Christmas morning seems like an old-timey thing, redolent of a day when families were closer, and people got more into the spirit of Christmas. Well, not to get all Grinchy, but they’re a commercial creation with a very specific start date. Family Christmas sleepwear sets started showing up in catalogs and ads in 1957. (There’d been father-son, mother-daughter, and husband-wife pajama sets before, but not for the whole family, nor with a Christmas angle.) At this point, red and white are the only colors, which is not only a Santa Claus-approved colorway but equally suitable for all ages and genders.

My guess is that somebody in the apparel industry realized December 25 is pretty much the one morning everybody sits around in their pajamas with their families, and asked the question he got paid to ask: how can we make money from this? Not that there’s anything wrong with that. These vibrant Yuletide uniforms have an undeniable cheesy, cozy, cutesy charm, whatever the motives behind their creation.

The ‘60s: “Family Pajama Party”

As those kids grew up and wanted to be cool, though, that cheesiness became a liability. Matching PJs started to feel passe, a relic of the Ike age unsuited (sorry) to the tempestuous ‘60s. Sears and Montgomery Ward tried to juice the formula with new stylistic influences, like Western and Nordic. Blue joined the red-and-white mix for the first time.

The tweaks don’t seem to have made much difference. For aspiring young longhairs, the cultural headwinds made dressing up like your parents a non-starter - indeed, the whole concept of pajamas was suspiciously uptight, let alone paying The Man for a special set to only wear around Christmas. By mid-decade, family pajama sets had virtually disappeared from the market, and they’d stay gone for several years. They were just too Ozzie & Harriet for a Woodstock world.

The ‘70s: “Classic Country Look”

A funny thing happened on the way to the future: family Christmas pajamas made a comeback, just when those boomer kids were starting to have kids of their own. This time, there was more of an attempt to differentiate the adults’ sleepwear from the kids’, and male from female. Rather than a uniform, the family PJs of the ‘70s tended toward coordinated variations on a design theme.

As with the era’s home decor, these sets often used “country” elements to evoke an earlier era of coordinated family pajamas that never existed. Historical accuracy aside, young boomer parents could enjoy the nostalgia of their own childhood Christmases while maintaining a distinct look for every me in the Me Generation family.

Of course, today, matching family PJs are a Christmas fixture like never before. After another low point on the fam-jammies cycle in the ‘80s, they came roaring back in the ‘90s by hip brands like Hanna Andersson. In our nothing-ever-dies era, they’re big sellers from Target and Old Navy on down, you can get them in the full spectrum of licensed pop-culture properties, and they starred in a Taylor Swift video. If this family Christmas pajama revival keeps up, I might have to remove the quotes from “tradition”.

Yep, we do the family Christmas pajamas. We also do stockings for the whole family. Heading down the stairs together, and then spending a little time poking through the little gifts, obligatory orange, and random candies while we’re still waking up with the cup of coffee is essential. Or I thought it was, until I found out my wife’s family skips the whole deal and jumps right to the presents. What!?

What holiday traditions do you indulge in, and which do you avoid? Let’s hear about ‘em in this week’s Shoddy Goods chat.

—Dave (and the rest of Meh)

’Twas the newsletter before Christmas, and down in the footer, story links were stirring to Shoddy Goods’ most gooder:

• How the zither took Eisenhower America by storm

• The ‘80s were brown

• Have an Ed Herlihy Christmas

They knew how to party in 1950

In the rubble of post-World War II Vienna, Carol Reed heard something he liked. The English film director came to town in 1948 to shoot The Third Man, a haunting tale of intrigue starring Orson Welles and Joseph Cotten, and written by Graham Greene. When he stopped in to a wine bar one night, Reed was captivated not by the drinks but by the music.

Simple but rich, refined but gritty, and just exotic enough, it was played on a stringed instrument called the zither by a journeyman Viennese musician named Anton Karas. Reed thought the sound would be perfect for his movie. So, with translation help from bystanders, he asked Karas on the spot to come back to England with him and compose the film’s score. Karas tried to beg off, saying he’d never written music before. But Reed wouldn’t take no for an answer.

The infectious tune Karas came up with - known as “The Harry Lime Theme” or “The Third Man Theme” - was one the biggest and most unlikely global hits of 1950. In the US, it spent 11 weeks at the top of the Billboard chart and was the 3rd-best-selling single of the year, just ahead of a competing version by bandleader Guy Lombardo. The bouncy little Middle European melody would propel both Karas and his instrument into the glare of the spotlight - a place neither of them were quite ready for.

Meet the zither

34 strings and the truth. Watch Anton Karas play the zither

“Zither“ refers to a whole family of stringed instruments where the strings don’t extend beyond the sound box. They don’t have necks, like guitars or violins. The strings aren’t stretched across an open frame, like harps. The family ranges from the Chinese guqin to the Appalachian autoharp to the West African adjulin. Think an acoustic guitar body without a neck, that you play on a table or your lap, and you’re in the ballpark.

Karas specifically played a concert zither, with 5 melody strings on a fretboard (meaning each can play different notes depending on where it’s held down on the fretboard) and 29 accompaniment strings played open (so each can only play the one note it’s tuned to).

The concert zither isn’t some improvised jug-band contraption. It’s as highly refined as any other instrument in the European musical tradition. Watch Karas playing it and it’s obvious the zither isn’t something where you can just pick it up and bang out a little tune. The sound hole gives the instrument its volume and resonance, and Karas’s special low tuning gives it its grit, but the fullness of the sound - hard to believe as one instrument - is all Karas.

We are Viennese if you please

Which is all well and good - but how do you get from that to a pop hit? Ahead of the movie’s release, MGM hired a maverick promo man named Jim Moran to travel around the country posing as a speculator buying up all the nation’s zithers. Moran would inform the local media that he’d pay $50 (about $650 today) for any used zither, before The Third Man made zithers a hot commodity. “I’ll be rich,” he told the Galveston Daily News, while insisting his quest had nothing to do with promoting the film.

More likely, the tune’s inherent catchiness and freshness was enough to prick up American ears. Contrary to the stereotype of the staid whitebread ‘50s, a series of imported musical styles enjoyed brief vogues through the decade, from rumba and calypso to bossa nova and Irish folk. “The Harry Lime Theme” scratched that exotica itch first, and the zither craze was on.

“Out of a basement”

The door was open for a wave of zither-pop that would last a decade. Ruth Welcome‘s romantic solo zithering got her signed to Capitol Records, while Australia’s singing zitherer Shirley Abicair moved to London and became a bona fide star well into the ‘70s.

Who’s ready to get zithered?

At the grassroots level, the aging members of zither clubs from Buffalo to Honolulu found themselves unexpectedly aligned with the mainstream. Mostly Germanic immigrants and remnants of an early zither craze during the 1880s, these last zither diehards anticipated new blood. When a Portland, Oregon newspaper said the zither was dead, a dozen local players protested. “I have much hope,” said Adolph Robl, former president of the Zither Club of Baltimore, told the Baltimore Sun in 1950.

There was just one problem: it was hard to find zithers. The only zither factory in America at the time was a one-man operation run by Albert Hesse of Washington, Missouri, who hilariously couldn’t have cared less about cashing in on the new fad.

The St. Louis Globe-Democrat reported the 73-year-old craftsman was content to “putter about the plant a few hours each day”, repairing old zithers and filling orders for strings, paying no attention to the 10-20 mail requests from the newly zither-curious. “If I did, I’d never get any work done.” He closed down for good in 1954.

What did Hesse think about Karas’s breakthrough hit? “I did not hear it,” he told the Chicago Tribune. “I guess they got the player out of a basement or a beer stube.”

That’s the kind of talk that could start serious beef, except Karas had started to hate his signature tune, too. “This tune takes a lot out of your fingers,” he said. “I prefer playing ‘Wien, Wien’, the sort of thing one can play all night while eating sausages at the same time.”

He was in demand as a touring act overseas, which he also hated. “It is because of that film that I was pushed from one place to the other,” Karas said. “My only desire was to be back home again.”

So, with real instruments limited to pricy imports or dusty 70-year-old castoffs, and a reluctant star who’d rather stay home and eat sausages, the ‘50s zither craze did not spawn a boom of new zither players. But, doubtless to the irritation of those stern Teutonic zither perfectionists, it did spawn the Junior Zither.

Bowtie required

Essentially a music-education toy, the Junior Zither came with song sheets you could slide under the strings that showed you exactly how to pick out simple melodies on the order of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star”. It’s a long way from the virtuosity of Karas. But the idea must have resonated (sorry), because variations like The Music Maker Lap Harp remain on the market today - I can’t resist plinking around on it whenever I see one at a toy store.

While “The Harry Lime Theme” still sounds strikingly original today, the brief ‘50s zither fad is now as long ago as the 1880s craze was then. Maybe that means it’s all firmly consigned to history’s attic - or maybe we’re due for another zither craze.

I never got pushed to try any musical instrument out as a kid. I suppose I enjoyed not having my afternoons forced into relentlessly practicing scales, but I do feel like I missed out a little on not being able to hammer out Christmas tunes on call.

How about you? Ever learn, or attempt to learn an instrument? If you could, Matrix-style, instantly be an expert at one, which would you pick? Let’s discuss in this week’s Shoddy Goods chat.

—Dave (and the rest of Meh)

Have you heard? Everybody but EVERYbody is talking about these fresh, original Shoddy Goods stories:

• A calculator for ladies, for some reason

• Jenny Lind: the original queen of music merchandise

• No, Hallmark did not invent wrapping paper

If anything is ungendered, you’d think math would be. The square root of 144 is always 12, whatever your particular chromosomal arrangement. Anything multiplied by 1 still equals itself, no matter where that self defines its place on the gender spectrum.

A major business technology concern like Adler should know that. You don’t go from a humble bicycle manufacturer to the world’s sixth-largest manufacturer of office machines if you don’t understand numbers. And yet, in 1975, that didn’t stop them from marketing a pocket calculator “for women”.

Press the ladybuttons to enter ladynumbers and ladycalculate the ladymath

“Designed for milady”

“The chic, boutique calculator designed specially for women,” ran the ads that started appearing in fall of that year. “The Litton/Adler ‘Lady’ is the only electronic calculator specifically designed for milady.” [shudder] You can feel the ad tipping its fedora. “Ruby red and gold tone create a truly striking conversation piece… slips easily into the smallest purse.”

A Mother’s Day campaign the following year calls the Lady “the electronic calculator that recognizes there’s a difference between men and women… a daring departure from drab black and white… tinier than a regular size pack of cigarettes.” The ad copy goes on to helpfully reminds the fairer sex of all that mean old math that the Lady could help with: “it’s ideal for check book balancing, preparing tax returns, supermarket shopping.”

If Barbie and Ken were rudimentary computers

Lest anyone suspect Adler of white-knighting for the gals, they came up with a little something for the fellas, too: the Sir, a masculine companion in non-nonsense silver and black… meaning it looks like a regular old non-gender-specific calculator, if a bit ahead of its time. If there’s anything sillier than a calculator for women, it’s a calculator for men.

Each one came with its own little leather carrying case: a soft scarlet pouch with a gold keyring for the Lady, a rugged black wallet for the Sir. Hmm, you know, the barricade of a thin layer of leather could be a pretty good way to discourage you from compulsively looking at your phone. [adds note to “Million-Dollar Ideas” file]

Tron vs. Barbarella

Here’s the thing: the Lady is indeed a “striking” piece of ‘70s industrial design. The deep red and gold color scheme really pops, of course. But the subtle form factor differences are distinctive, too. Where the Sir is all right angles, the Lady tapers toward the ends to form a gently irregular hexagon, with more rounded top corners.

The Sir’s design was also pretty bold for 1975. Where it foreshadows ‘80s aesthetics, the Lady hangs on to more of a late-’60s, early-’70s retro-future vibe. The Sir is Tron and Battlestar Galactica while the Lady is 2001 and Barbarella. None of which, of course, has anything to do with gender.

At least the Adler boys had the restraint not to spell out 5318008 on the screen

Predictably, the gendered marketing of these two pretty neat little calculators didn’t do them any favors. There’s a fine line between targeting your audience and limiting your audience. As with the Bic for Her fiasco 37 years later, if the manufacturer had just rolled out these new designs sans sexual designations and let the public make up their own minds about who they were “for”, they probably would’ve sold better.

Or at least, not any worse. By 1977, Adler stopped marketing both the Lady and the Sir. They’re remembered fondly by vintage calculator enthusiasts. Both pop up on eBay and Etsy regularly, especially the Lady; you can probably land one for $20-$30, depending on condition.

The Lady in Red

Looking back from 50 years later, what strikes me is how little the Lady’s design would read as “for her” today. Even if feminine product design has evolved beyond cliched pink and purple pastels and flowing curves (looking at you again, Bic for Her), the dominant mood of women-coded products could still be summed up as “calm”. The Lady’s brassy colors and harder edges are much more in-your-face.

Maybe the Lady wasn’t “feminine” because of the particular aesthetic as much as the presence of any aesthetic sense at all. I guess a male calculator operator must be too busy conducting serious business to fool around with fripperies like vivid colors and stylized lettering.

Or maybe trying to pin down his-and-hers style is inherently doomed to be inexact and quickly dated, because visual indicators of gender change across different times and places. Unlike, you know, math.

I’m secure enough in my masculinity to admit this calculator set is freaking badass

I love the Japanese snack Pocky sticks in all their flavors, but I’ve always been mystified that there’s a Pocky for Men…flavor. Have you seen any other weird “for men” or “for women” type of products that make no sense other than some marketer thinking they have a cheap way to increase sales? Let’s talk about ‘em in this week’s Shoddy Goods chat.

—Dave (and the rest of Meh)

You don’t have to own any particular equipment to enjoy these gender-neutral Shoddy Goods stories:

• What Speed Stick’s package design tells us about masculinity

• Capri the island vs. Capri the cigarette

• The cheapest Michelin-starred meal in America

Where can you stuff your gut high-class style without spending an arm and a leg? Read on, ravenous one

I’m blessed with an unrefined palate. You know that scene in Ratatouille when the foodie-rat Remy is trying to explain the brilliance of cuisine to his cloddish brother Émile? I’ll admit I’m more of an Émile. And I’m OK with that.

While I love to eat, I don’t have the kind of finely tuned tongue that can either elevate a meal to transcendent art on the level of the greatest music or movies, or ruin it because some little detail fails to meet my exacting standard. For the most part, I think food that isn’t straight-up disgusting is usually pretty good.

So when I go out to eat, I’m usually willing to settle somewhere in the midrange rather than shell out for peak dining experiences. The difference just isn’t enough, to me, to justify the price. I could buy, like, five books with that money! Hardcovers, even!

But what if a culinary philistine like me wanted to try a Michelin-starred restaurant just to see what the fuss was about? What’s the least you could get away with spending, in the United States? There are lots of suggestions out there, but I want a specific dollar amount at one specific restaurant.

Full stomachs, full wallets

Let’s figure it out. First, the rules. The restaurant must be awarded at least one star by the Michelin Guide; those in their “Bib Gourmand” and “Selected Restaurants” category don’t count.

Then, let’s define our sample meal. This is about bargain indulgence, not number-go-down for its own sake, so we’re not talking bread, ketchup, and hot water. I decided a fair look at what a legit dining experience actually costs would include at least one appetizer or side, a main dish, a dessert, and a glass of wine (or a high-end soft drink, if they don’t serve wine).

And we also won’t pick the very cheapest options, because chances are those wouldn’t all be what you’d actually want to eat. I’d decided to pick the second- or third-cheapest in each category, unless there were only two options, where I’d pick the cheaper. That seems like a good rough estimate of where you’d wind up if you were being conscious of price but not fanatical about it.

Putting the “bib” in “Bibendum”

OK, so when I set the Michelin Guide’s search parameters to restaurants in the USA with at least one star and in their lowest price category ($$, or “A moderate spend”), nine restaurants are left standing. I looked at all their menus, wiped the drool off my keyboard, and realized that my little structure wouldn’t necessarily fit every restaurant.

Some have more of a share-plate vibe. Some include sides with mains while others don’t. Some don’t serve wine or don’t publish their drink menus online. So I took my best guess as a certified cheapskate for what combination of dishes would capture the experience. And remember, menus change constantly, sometimes every day, so don’t hold me to any of these dishes or prices.

And the dinner is…

Congratulations, hungry Texans. Four of the top five most affordable Michelin-starred restaurants in America are barbecue joints in your state, three of which are in Austin. I swear I’m not saying this just because Meh is headquartered in Texas. I’m sure each of you has a favorite that hasn’t earned that coveted star, but take that up with the Michelin man. (And tell me about it in the comments, for the next time I’m in the Lone Star State.)

My semi-unscientific survey says these five meals are the shortest route from your wallet to Michelin-star dining in America:

5th-cheapest: Leroy and Lewis Barbecue, Austin, TX, $50

• Main: 1 Meat & 2 Sides Plate, $17

• Side: Hog Fat Cornbread, $9

• Dessert: Cheddar cheesecake, $9

• Drink: Wine for the People Sauvignon Blanc, $15

4th-cheapest: Holbox, Los Angeles, CA, $46

• Appetizer: Tostada de Atun, $12

• Main: Grilled Kanpachi Collars, $18

• Dessert: Churros & chocolate sauce, $7

• Drink: San Pellegrino sparkling water, $9

3rd-cheapest: la Barbecue, Austin, TX, $41

• Main: 1/2 lb. Pulled pork, $15.50

• Sides: Potato salad, $4.50 & Chipotle Coleslaw, $4.50

• Dessert: Rockman cookie, $6.50

• Drink: House red wine, $10

2nd-cheapest: InterStellar BBQ, Austin, TX, $40

• Main: 1/2 lb. Pork ribs, $17

• Sides: Smoked Gouda Mac & Cheese, $4 & Jalapeno Slaw, $4

• Dessert: Banana pudding, $5

• Drink: bring your own bottle of wine, $10 (estimate)

Cheapest: CorkScrew BBQ, Spring, TX, $33.50

• Main: 1/2 lb. Turkey breast plate, $15

• Sides: 3-Cheese Mac, $4 & Pit-Smoked Beans, $4

• Dessert: Cobbler, $4

• Drink: 32 oz. Tea, $6.50

Feast your eyes on that! You can still get a full Michelin-starred nosh on for fifty bucks or less… if you happen to be in Texas or LA. If not, well, maybe it’s time to move there.

My sample meals for all nine of the contenders, with links to menu sources, are in this spreadsheet. I applied my own semi-subjective method across the board, but some menus are hard to find online. So if you own one of these restaurants and feel like I was looking at an inaccurate or outdated menu, sorry, but keeping your menu current and accessible might be a good idea. Otherwise, congrats to you all on behalf of tightwad gourmands across America!

Now, just one question remains: why did I torture myself by writing this piece on an empty stomach?

CorkScrew BBQ owners Will and Nichole Buckman with a big fan (from the CorkScrew Instagram)

And the dishes in the main image up top are from (L to R) CorkScrew, Holbox, la Barbecue, and Interstellar

I hesitate to say I have a particularly refined diet—some of my favorite meals have been the eggs, hashbrowns, and toast at the local diner—but I’ll splurge when the opportunity arises. How about you: outside of home, what’s the best meal experience you’ve ever had? Let’s hear about it in this week’s Shoddy Goods chat.

—Dave (and the rest of Meh)

Enjoy these finely seasoned, expertly prepared past Shoddy Goods stories for the low, low price of $0:

• The strange case of Ducky McCaleb, inventor and/or conman

• 3D-printed food is perfectly normal (seriously)

• The miles higher club: tips from a travel rewards maximizer

A young man with big dreams and a lot of court dates ahead of him, 1949

I was listening to a recording on YouTube of a 1957 radio broadcast from Lubbock, Texas, because that’s the kind of weird thing I do. Right after the Four Esquires’ “Love Me Forever”, a lullaby of a commercial promised “Your baby will sleep as peacefully as a Christmas angel when he sleeps in a Ducky Bed.”

This wasn’t just a pitch for a comfy mattress. With a sound sensor “as sensitive as a mother’s ear”, the Ducky Bed “hears the [baby’s] cry and begins to gently rock the baby to sleep.” This parenting Godsend was “manufactured in Lubbock for babies all over the world.”

OK, a cry-detecting self-rocking bed, that’s the kind of oddity I can build a Shoddy Goods around. I figured there had to be more to the company and the invention. For all I knew, Ducky Bed had grown into a household name, and spawned a whole category of sob-triggered swaying cribs. This was just one random radio recording from 1957, out of billions of hours of radio that have ever been broadcast, that I happened to stumble across on YouTube. Statistically, what were the chances this product was a weird local one-off?

Turns out that’s exactly what it was. I could only rustle up scant traces of historical evidence of the Ducky Bed. But its namesake inventor, Cloyce Leon “Ducky” McCaleb, left his own record behind - largely of the criminal variety.

“Cadillac of the Baby Industry”

To hear the Diamond Department Store tell it in a 1957 ad in the Arizona Republic, the Ducky Bed was the product of “the inquisitive mind of a Texas farm boy.” They spun a tale straight out of Horatio Alger, about a plucky 38-year-old back-country genius by the colorful name of Ducky McCaleb experimenting for years to bring sweet relief to bedraggled parents everywhere.

It’s all in there: his childhood improvising solutions on the farm with whatever junk was at hand… his tortured nights driving his wailing baby son around to get him to sleep… his first clunky contraptions of springs, belts, and scavenged engine parts.

After getting the original 500-pound prototype down to 80 pounds, and replacing the loud motor with a quieter, smaller one, Ducky had his Ducky Bed. A “two tube electronic unit which filters out ordinary conversations” then “accepts the cry of the baby” and “converts this to start the small fractional horse motor” that gently rocks the crib.

So soundtronic, you guys

It sounds like a good idea. For about two seconds. Until you consider that new parents, the most paranoid creatures on Earth, may not be wild about putting their precious, vulnerable baby inside a runaway shaking machine, even a “soundtronically controlled” one that calls itself the “Cadillac of the Baby Industry”.

But maybe parents weren’t the ultimate audience. In other ads seeking potential investors, McCaleb’s co-founder Charlie Moore offered franchises starting at $5,000, “depending on the territory granted”. The ad claimed Ducky Bed already had “successful dealerships now in operation”.

Not that successful, apparently. Or, more likely, nonexistent. Just months later, in May of 1958, Ducky Bed filed for bankruptcy. An auction that July offered the 134 working Ducky Beds still in stock, the company’s production and office equipment - and the patent to the Ducky Bed.

“An acorn company with oak tree ideas”

But you can’t keep a good-sounding idea down. Splashed across the front page of the Paris, Texas News on December 11, 1960 was a banner headline proclaiming that Paris had landed a new plant for a company called Roka-Bed, led by none other than C.L. McCaleb and Charlie Moore. I guess nobody bought that patent.

Moore told the paper that Roka-Bed - “an acorn company with oak tree ideas” - would “consolidate” its “subsidiary operations in several Texas cities” into a 35,000-square-foot former potato chip factory, housing “50 or more employees initially”. The piece listed the many products of McCaleb’s “keen inventive mind” that Roka-Bed manufactured and distributed, from baby beds and baby bottles to “portable shower cabinets for hospitals” and “electronically automatic irrigation systems”. Hmmm. Really?

I can’t say Roka-Bed didn’t have operations all over Texas, and couldn’t possibly have hired 50 people. I’m not saying, definitively, that they never manufactured a single shower cabinet or irrigation system. You can’t prove a negative. I am saying that I couldn’t find a shred of evidence that they ever did any of that. For all the big talk in this piece, it was all the Paris News would ever say about Roka-Bed.

We’ll never have Paris. Moore and McCaleb are third and fourth from left in the photo

A functioning, 50-strong small-town manufacturing firm would pop up in the local paper now and then, in news stories, want ads, legal notices, something. A company pumping out a wide range of innovative devices would attract attention from the likes of Popular Mechanics. A Roka-Bed that did half of what Moore described would leave traces. It didn’t.

There’s one thing Moore and McCaleb were known for doing with the company: illegally selling stock in it. In 1963, they were charged with violations of the Securities Act for peddling unregistered shares of Roka-Bed to at least 19 fellow Lubbockites. The following year McCaleb was at it again, allegedly hawking unofficial stock in a whole new venture called Auto-Relaxor that made even less impression on the historical record.

It starts to look like the Ducky Bed was less a way to rock babies to sleep, and more a vehicle for McCaleb and Moore to siphon cash from credulous, perhaps sleep-deprived backers. Did they stage the whole Paris hullabaloo as a show for impatient investors wondering what their money was going?

At this point, I was still giving McCaleb the benefit of the doubt. He seemed to me an understandable figure, maybe even a sympathetic one: the striving tinkerer whose ideas are bigger than his business acumen, walking the line of what’s advisable or legal to keep his dream alive.

But his next and final public episode settles it once and for all. Whatever else he did, Ducky also employed his “keen inventive mind” for pure fraud.

The Canyon of Nonexistent Silver

According to court records, in November 1972, McCaleb began telling one Dr. Wayne Hill of Brownfield, Texas that he’d found a cache of silver hidden in a Nevada canyon. McCaleb offered Hill a share of the proceeds if the doctor could furnish funds for the equipment needed to retrieve the silver.

Hill’s initial $1000 investment soon turned into $5000, then another $5000, then more and more. Darn the luck, that hoard of silver just kept getting tougher and tougher to get out of that canyon. Eventually McCaleb wheedled more than $24,000 out of Hill.

Of course, it was all a lie. There was no silver. “All of these checks were cashed by [McCaleb] and the funds applied to his own use,” the court said. “The cache of silver never existed and no equipment or supplies as represented were ever purchased… The evidence is clear that McCaleb’s purpose was to ‘con’ Dr. Hill out of as much money as possible.”

They don’t have Ducky Beds where you’re going

Oh, Ducky, what are you doing? There’s no way to spin this one. On January 16, 1975, McCaleb was found guilty of “theft by false pretext” in a Brownfield courtroom and later sentenced to five years in prison. His appeal was denied the following year.

Then he slipped out of the public eye. I presume he served at least some of that sentence but I couldn’t find any details confirming it. He’s mentioned as still being alive in family obituaries in the 1980s, but beyond that, I couldn’t find an obituary or gravestone for McCaleb himself. Wherever he ended up, it was a long way from the nursery of the future.

But what about his idea that started it all? What about the Ducky Bed’s soundtronic dream of a bed that rocks the baby to sleep while Mom and Dad repose in blissful slumber? Every so often somebody tries out a new angle on the concept: current contenders include Snoo and Sleepytroll. Maybe they can be the ones to overcome parents’ reluctance to let an unattended machine shake their babies. After all, the only people the Ducky Bed ever hurt were the ones who invested in it.

I obviously don’t remember if my parents used any special tech to get me to sleep as a baby - I suspect it was just the audio monitors that later became video monitors everyone has now. My earliest “tech” memories are the family getting an Apple ][ when I was a few years old, though I think it was more consequential when I got my very own Speak N Spell at age 5 or so. I specifically remember getting the add-on ET module I could plug into the back to add more words like, I suppose, TERRESTRIAL. What’re your earliest tech memories? Let’s hear about ‘em in this week’s Shoddy Goods chat.

—Dave (and the rest of Meh)

There’s gold in these here past Shoddy Goods stories, and you don’t need any drills or trucks to get it:

• When the isle of Capri sued the cigarette called Capri

• Who snuffed out the everlasting match?

• The Mafia, music videos, and the rise and fall of Scopitones

You’ve come the wrong way, baby?

Since Caesar Augustus decided to make it his permanent vacation home in 29 BC, the island of Capri has been the A-list playground of all A-list playgrounds. Jutting dramatically up out of the sapphire-blue sea just off the coast of Naples, this tiny 4-square-mile shard of paradise has lured every famous name from Lenin to J-Lo.

And it seems like for almost that long, people have been naming products after it. Capri pants, of course, were made famous by the glamorous likes of Audrey Hepburn and Brigitte Bardot. Several car models have taken the name, most notably the Ford Capri, a sporty ‘70s coupe recently revived in Europe as a compact crossover electric SUV. There’s Capri Sun, Generation X’s favorite juice drink, several bands called the Capris, and countless hotels, casinos, and theaters.

All of these businesses are trying to evoke a sort of effortless style, a timeless luxury, a self-indulgent, sun-splashed, carefree, quintessentially Italian vibrance - and in turn, they’ve spread that reputation for the namesake island. It’s a symbiotic relationship that works for both sides.

But what if the people of Capri decided they’d rather not be associated with a certain product? Do they get a say in the matter?

17 millimeters of satisfaction

When tobacco behemoth Brown and Williamson acquired the brand from the now-defunct Lee Brothers, the cigarettes were known as Capri Rainbows for their multicolored papers. That gimmick didn’t exactly set the world on fire, and B&W lost the rainbows and turned it into a ho-hum, underperforming menthol brand.

Then came the rival Virginia Slims, a narrower cigarette “for her”. Its rise in the 1970s and 1980s made the industry realize there was gold in using a pseudo-feminist pitch to get more women addicted to nicotine. And hey, if the “slim” marketing happened to imply smoking them might make you thinner, well, you could hardly blame the tobacco companies for that, right? They can’t control what goes on in people’s heads.

So in 1986, Brown and Williamson aimed to one-up Virginia Slims with an even thinner ultra-slim cigarette, reviving their dormant Capri brand to do it.

WARNING: Use of this product increases the risk of kicky hats

The new Capris weren’t just skinny, they were downright emaciated: where a normal cigarette had a circumference of 25mm and Virginia Slims were at 23mm, Capris were just 17 millimeters around. An extra-long “luxury length” version accented the slimness even more, as did slogans like “The slimmest slim in town” and “There’s no slimmer way to smoke.”

With the help of saturation advertising - in two senses, with the electric ‘80s color palette of the ads - it worked. The toothpick-esque Capri became a best-selling cigarette brand in 60 countries. But going thin wasn’t the only trend affecting the tobacco industry at the time…

Butts in a name?

As in the rest of the Western world, Italy had seen falling smoking rates among men, from more than 70% in 1950 to less than 50% in 1980 - but an increase among women during the same period, from 10% to 20%. The overall rate was still falling, but as health officials and governments learned more and more about just how deadly smoking was, policy responses followed. The first official anti-smoking programs launched in Italy in 1981 and proliferated through the decade and beyond..

One of the government bodies that signed on in 1988 was the municipality of Capri, the local authority for about a third of the island’s territory and 60% of its population. I assume seeing their town’s name on cigarette packages must have seemed a little counterproductive.

“Antismoking mask” printed in Italian comics, to “put on when Dad smokes”, which probably got Dads to stop buying comics

In May 1989, Capri filed suit in Rome against Brown and Williamson, seeking to force the company to stop marketing cigarettes in Italy under the Capri name. Their case argued that they had the right to veto products that cast their locale in a negative light.

B&W, for their part, argued that they’d followed “all applicable laws in securing rights to use the Capri name in Italy and in other countries where the brand is sold,” as company spokesperson Valerie Oates put it. (A typo in the Associated Press story has immortalized her forever as “Valeris Oates”, but I checked, her name is “Valerie”.)

Now, it’s true that geographical names are not intellectual property in and of themselves. If you want to call your Mexican restaurant “Guadalajara” or sell sweatshirts that say “New York”, you’re free to do so. If you’re implying that the product was made in that location, you can get in trouble under appellation and place-of-origin laws. But that’s a different thing. Nobody was accusing Brown and Williamson of misrepresenting the cigarettes as being made in Capri. This was purely about whether they had the right to associate Capri with smoking.

Never let it be said that the Italian legal system, or really any legal system, arrives at decisions in undue haste. This lawsuit went on for 11 years, eventually reaching the highest court in Italy, the Supreme Court of Cassation.

They must be the bad guys - look at those leather gloves

In December 2000, the high court ruled in favor of Brown and Williamson - but with a twist. Because the Capri tobacco trademark had already been awarded before the municipality of Capri initiated its anti-smoking programs, the court declined to overturn the trademark or force B&W to stop marketing the cigarettes. In other words, maybe things would be different if B&W were first applying for the Capri trademark after the municipality of Capri had officially come out against smoking. Or maybe not.

By making it a matter of timing, the court sidestepped the fundamental question of whether the government of a place had the right to keep its name from being used for products it disapproved of. As far as I can find, there’s never been another case like it, and place-of-origin cases aside, nobody has ever been prevented from using a place name as a brand. Capri cigarettes remain on the market today. But still, I’d be careful about, say, naming your new brand of toxic sludge after your favorite vacation spot. Daytona Dioxin might raise a few eyebrows down in Florida.

Ok, I admit I thought this was going to be about Capri pants, and I was going to have to come up with a hot take on the exact right length of a pants leg. Instead, how about we talk about who’s been to Italy? I’ve never been to the island of Capri, but I once spent a day, but not a night in Venice, because the hotels were all too pricey. Let’s hear about your travels in this week’s Shoddy Goods chat.

—Dave (and the rest of Meh)

The only risk with these stories from the Shoddy Goods archive is that you may be excessively infotained:

• The rise and fall of Mr. Coffee Nerves

• When I tried the first e-cigs, way back in 2008

• 3D-printed food is normal, actually