Global canned food sales are now more than $210 billion annually. The average American eats about 200 pounds of canned food every year. Meanwhile the worldwide paper industry has seen steep falls in the production of newsprint, printing paper, and writing paper since 2010, but the rise in paper and cardboard packaging has more than made up for it. The paper industry is bigger than ever, with revenue of $485 billion in 2025.

For better or worse, our world would simply not look the same today without these two industries. And one person was the key figure in starting both of them. Bryan Donkin can legitimately claim to be the “father” of the canned-food industry and the paper industry as we know them. So who was he, besides one of the very few guys named Bryan in the 18th century?

Shake paper and roll

Born in northeastern England in 1768, Bryan Donkin went into the same business as his father: real estate. But it didn’t speak to him. So in 1792, at the rather ripe age of 24, he became an apprentice to John Hall at Dartford Iron Works to pursue his true calling as an engineer.

At the time, all paper was made by hand, more or less the same way it had been done since the Middle Ages. Cotton and linen rags were soaked in water and beaten into a pulp. A shallow, rectangular mold with a screen bottom would be dipped into the liquid slurry and shaken. A thin layer of the macerated fibers would settle on the screen; when dry, you’d have yourself a single sheet of paper.

Donkin started his post-apprenticeship career making these molds. But around 1801, he got connected to the Fourdrinier brothers, who produced stationery in London. They’d made a deal with a French inventor, Louis-Nicolas Robert, to bring a new paper-making machine to Britain. At the time, between the post-revolutionary turmoil in France and England’s more advanced industrial base, the latter seemed to hold more lucrative prospects for the new invention.

Unlike the laborious single-sheet, mold-based method, this new “Fourdrinier machine” used a cylinder to continuously produce rolls of paper. A mechanism called the “shake” agitated the conveyor belt at a high speed, to spread the wet pulp fibers in an even layer. Unfortunately, this rapid movement put a lot of strain on the mostly wooden machine. One of Donkin’s improvements was to use metal parts instead, for improved stability and precision.

Another refinement of his was adjusting the rollers that squeezed the water out of the paper, to maximize contact between them and the paper, to dry the paper more quickly and thoroughly. This and other improvements turned the Fourdrinier machine from an interesting prototype to a viable technical advancement.

It quickly became the industry standard, and remains so over 200 years later. The publishing boom of the late 19th and early 20th century wouldn’t have been possible without it. Those big machines you see today producing rolls of paper are most likely Fourdrinier machines. Donkin also made some key advancements in printing technology, so the Pulitzers and Murdochs of the world owe him double gratitude.

Oui, we can

His fortune secured, now the head of a company bearing his name that still exists (these days they make gas valves), Donkin’s restless mind turned to another puzzle: the preservation of food. Like too many technological quests, this one was spurred by military needs. Best frenemies England and France were both spreading their empires around the planet, frequently clashing, and looking for ways to keep their troops fed. In such wide-ranging conflicts as the Seven Years’ War (1756-1763), far more sailors died of malnutrition than in combat.

It seems yet another French inventor had visions of pounds sterling dancing in his eyes. Philippe de Girard had come up with a method of preserving food by putting in inside a sealed tin container, then boiling the container in water to sterilize it. Or maybe he swiped the method from another French inventor, Nicolas Appert. Or maybe they were in cahoots. What we do know is that in 1810, de Girard went to London and engaged a merchant named Peter Durand to be his frontman for getting a British patent, which de Girard would not have been eligible for since Britain and France were at war.

Durand was duly awarded the patent in his name. Ever since, he’s been often called the inventor of the tin can, despite having nothing to do with inventing it, and doing nothing with it except selling the patent for £1,000 in 1812. The buyer? Bryan Donkin’s old apprenticeship master, John Hall.

Now on equal terms as budding titans of industry, Hall put up the money and Donkin provided the brains along with a third partner, John Gamble, to bring tin canning to an industrial scale. Again, it took a couple of years, but Donkin and Gamble steadily refined the process. One of their major innovations was to use iron coated in a thin layer of tin, combining the strength of the former with the non-reactive properties of the latter for an imperturbable can that could survive the longest, roughest ocean voyages.

For the second time, a French invention plus Donkin’s enhancements equaled le jackpot. After getting the likes of Queen Charlotte and the Duke of Wellington hooked with some free samples of canned beef, the firm of Donkin, Hall and Gamble received an order for 156 pounds of canned food from the Admiralty in 1813. That grew to 2,939 pounds the following year, increasing annually to 9,000 pounds by 1821.

Having bested the canning challenge, Donkin again wandered off in search of other worlds to conquer: helping Charles Babbage with the “difference engine” that would eventually become the computer, consulting on bridge and canal projects, inventing the first metal pen and a screw-cutting machine, being a founding member of both the Institution of Civil Engineers and the Royal Astronomical Society.

He died in 1855, an esteemed eminence in Victorian scientific and engineering circles. Today Bryan Donkin’s impact is out of all proportion to his memory. On a visit to his grave in London, the BBC found it made no mention of his achievements. Cemetery staff didn’t know who he was.

Food and books are good, actually

I can sense the question from some quarters of the audience: are Bryan Donkin’s achievements worth celebrating? Not only did canned food help enable imperial conquest and war, it also led eventually to the mass industrialization of food production, with its attendant crises of public health and monocultural farming, and our psychological distance from our food supply. And one look at any municipal dump will show you how much paper and cardboard waste still goes into landfill, even in a supposedly “paperless world”.

Those points are well taken. But it’s easier to dismiss these advancements when you live in a world that’s always known them. Over the last century or two, large-scale paper production enabled the rise of mass literacy, from only 10% of the world’s population being literate in 1820 to 90% today.

And it’s not just British seamen who eat better because of canned food. A 2011-2013 National Institutes of Health study found that people who eat six or more canned items a week “consume more nutrient-dense food groups such as fruits, vegetables, dairy products, and protein-rich foods, and also have higher intakes of 17 essential nutrients” including potassium, calcium, and fiber. Canned food has helped overcome the tyrannies of distance and time to get more nutrition to more people.

From the perspective of people in 1810, both food canning and mass paper production were immense steps forward. We can’t lay our subsequent inability to maintain some equilibrium at their feet. It’s true that Bryan Donkin didn’t invent the machines he perfected. Both industries probably would have happened, in some form, eventually, without him. But in being the first to perfect them for large-scale use, and granting all the downsides they’ve brought along with them, he hastened the coming of a less hungry, more educated world. Not bad for a guy named Bryan.

I’ve long wondered what I might be able to invent, if I went back in time with no supplies or information other than what’s currently in my head. Probably not a paper manufacturing machine or canned food. My best idea so far, as long as we are past the age of Gutenberg’s printing press, is the Choose Your Own Adventure style books. How about you, what would you be able to invent, with time travel to anytime in the past 500 years? Let’s hear about it in this week’s Shoddy Goods chat.

—Dave (and the rest of Meh)

Become a well-rounded polymath by devouring these previous Shoddy Goods stories:

• The Far Side and the golden age of the page-a-day calendar

• Where's the Speef? The pretenders to the canned-meat throne

• Inventor or con-man? The case of the self-rocking crib

And if you like Shoddy Goods, don’t miss Jason’s new other newsletter, Gnomenclature. Every week he digs into the 178-year-history of Hammacher Schlemmer, America’s oddest retailer. It’s gonna get weird!

Parents of teenagers, you get it. Especially if you’re as lazy as I am. You need to communicate some essential information or ask a crucial question of an adolescent located inconveniently in another room. You call out at a volume you know can be heard from that distance. Silence. They’re holed up with headphones or something. Again.

So, to avoid a laborious trek down the hallway, you (meaning I) pick up your (my) phone and text them. Or call, if it’s really serious. To send a message twenty feet, you bounce it off a cellular tower a mile away. Am I the only one who feels a pang of guilt over the WALL-E-like sloth and decadence of this digital convenience?

20th-century technology once offered another solution to this predicament: the home intercom system. It wasn’t quite as ridiculous - but still a little too ridiculous to really change The Way We Lived.

“Standard equipment in the home of tomorrow”

“A ‘Sound Investment’ for Every Home! A Blessing for a Busy Mother,” says a 1958 brochure for NuTone built-in home intercom systems. “She speaks softly… and yet is heard in every corner of the house.”

For companies like NuTone, hopes were high that the age of intra-home radio had come. The postwar building boom saw more than 1 million new homes built in 1946, climbing to 1.95 million in 1950 and staying well above a million annually thereafter.

Those homes were filling up with modern conveniences, too. In 1941, only 45% of US homes had an electric refrigerator; by 1957, that figure had doubled to 90%. Before the war, only 55% of American homes had complete plumbing (hot and cold running water, a bathtub or shower, and a flush toilet). By 1960, that number would be up to 83%. Telephones, too, spread rapidly after the war: from 45% of homes in 1945 to 75% by 1957.

Homes were starting to get bigger. The size of the average new home built in 1950 was 983 square feet, while in 1960, it was 1,289 square feet - in other words, the average home grew by 31% through the decade.

The millions of families stretching out in these spacious, modern new homes would need to talk to each other, right? What better way than the friendly old radio? And what better time to build a home intercom system than right along with the rest of the new house?

As a 1953 newspaper story put it, “Many experts say that such systems will be standard equipment in the so-called ‘home of tomorrow’.”

Home Communo-phone Systems

“We feel any new house that costs from $18,000 and up is a potential market,” said L.H. Bogen of the Bogen electronic company in 1953, when that price was about the median for new homes. “The cost of the average installation is not expensive - about $300 (about $3750 today), but the small house owner just wouldn’t have as much need for it.” He said his company had sold 6,000 “home communo-phone systems” over the previous two years.

Another manufacturer that same year said “Mother may not be a broadcaster, but she knows her needs as a homemaker. So the intercom units are designed to fit her needs for simple operation.”

Their design model was radio. These units, set flush into a wall at about head height, had a familiar configuration: mostly speaker, with a set of dials and a switch or two. A bigger base unit, generally shown in the kitchen, connected to smaller “remotes” throughout the house.

While the functionality varied, home intercoms generally allowed two-way communication, or whole-house announcements, or eavesdropping on a particular room, like a baby monitor. Most included AM/FM radio that could be piped throughout the system, so Mother the non-broadcaster could listen from room to room.

The novelty of hearing a familiar voice coming from the “radio”, and the feeling of being in a science fiction future, sparked a wave of excitement over home intercoms. Newspapers ran stories like this one from Arizona, about three neighbors who connected their homes with an intercom system set up by one of their teenage sons. They could chat while each were doing their chores, and mingle in each other’s homes freely while keeping an ear out for the kids.

It was practical, it was futuristic, it was kind of fun. So why did home intercoms never really catch on?

“Hated that thing so much”

Statistics are hard to come by, but wired home intercoms never made the leap that TVs and telephones did, from luxury to essential. Anecdotally, they’re remembered mainly as either something only rich people had, or as a little-used, troublesome white elephant. “What a waste of money that was, we never used it,” said one Facebook user.

“We used it as a baby monitor,” said Redditor Xyzzydude. “That required a bunch of switch flipping at the central station to figure out. They weren’t exactly flexible or user friendly… That was the only practical use we got out [of] it in over 40 years.”

“Our intercom system caught fire when I was a teenager,” another Redditor, FireWaterSquaw, said. “My brother and I hated that thing so much. Our parents would abuse it to wake us up for school.”

It’s a classic case of “features vs. benefits”. Yeah, home intercoms could do something. But that something just didn’t improve people’s lives enough to be worth the expense and effort of using it. Once the novelty wore off, an expensive, hard-wired, finicky unitasker was a tough sell.

Dedicated home intercom systems lingered for a few decades, gradually made redundant by other devices that were either more multifunctional or simpler. First came portable “wireless” intercoms that plugged into any outlet and carried sound on the home’s electrical wiring. Then, in the 1970s, some phone systems allowed you to dial to other extensions in the same house. The mid-’80s saw the first cordless phones with simple page and intercom functions between handsets, while simple wireless baby monitors made it easy to keep an ear on your kids.

Smart phones and smart speakers would seem to have finished the home intercom off for good. But they also affirm its basic use case, like every time I call my daughter two rooms away. With concern growing about data security, and a mood drift toward simpler “dumb” technology, the time may have come for the dedicated home intercom to make a comeback.

New systems like the Hosmart Ultraspeak and the Wuloo S600 might just be the first of a new generation of unconnected, cloud-free, wireless home intercoms. And you probably don’t need to worry about them catching on fire.

My childhood home (built in 1973) totally had these intercom systems in every bedroom, though I can't remember ever using them. Possibly for the crappy radio they had before I got my own. How about you, ever had these in your house or seen them in any others? Have anything quirky installed in your place that future residents will wonder about and/or gripe about having to uninstall? (I'm guessing my 'smart' thermostats will not be appreciated in the future.) Let's hear about 'em in this week's Shoddy Goods chat.

—Dave (and the rest of Meh)

Tune into these previous Shoddy Goods stories wherever fine infotainment is narrowcasted:

• Porta-Fi: when GE tried to wire your house for sound

• The radio ad blocker that never got manufactured

• The first baby monitor was a work of art, literally

And if you like Shoddy Goods, don’t miss Jason’s new other newsletter, Gnomenclature. Every week he digs into the 178-year-history of Hammacher Schlemmer, America’s oddest retailer. It’s gonna get weird!

“Ad blocking is a threat to the whole advertising industry. It’s essential people understand that online content isn’t free.” - David Frew of the Internet Advertising Bureau on ad blockers, 2015

“No advertiser will pay $500,000 for a 30-second spot on Friends if it gets to the point where everybody is skipping over the commercials. And if advertising revenue dries up, who’s going to pay to create the product?” - Garth Ancier of Turner Broadcasting on TiVo, 2003

“Fast-forward modes and TV sets with remote control are the biggest threats to TV advertising today.” - Richard Kostyra of J. Walter Thompson on VCRs and mute buttons, 1984

It’s gone back and forth for decades. Audiences naturally want to avoid obnoxious, intrusive advertising. Innovators come up with technology that gives them that control. Publishers, broadcasters, and advertisers warn that it could mean the end of the very entertainment or news the audience wants. Everybody’s got a point. Advertisers get more clever about slipping in ads (like this sneaky plug for today’s Meh deal) and viewers get more savvy about avoiding them. As today’s story shows, this dynamic isn’t going anywhere. And it’s a lot older than the VCR.

“Born to be robbed”

“Lee de Forest is a roué, a cad, a thief,” says historian Susan Douglas in the 1992 Ken Burns documentary Empire of the Air, “and yet, probably the man most responsible for bringing radio broadcasting to the American public.” Lee de Forest’s self-defeating antics could fill a book, and in fact, they have: the documentary was based on a book of the same name by Tom Lewis, from which I’ve cribbed much of the following overview.

From an early age, de Forest was the prototypical brooding geek: socially awkward, convinced of his own genius, rejected by his peers who called him “monkey face”, contemptuous toward his intellectual inferiors, the “hayseeds, farmers, ignorant, uncouth, rough fellows.” Around 1900, in his late 20s, doctorate from Yale newly in hand, de Forest became convinced his destiny lie in “wireless telegraphy”, or what we would call radio.

This destiny would express itself in a pattern of stolen ideas, grandiose claims, financial chicanery, and bitterly broken partnerships for the rest of his life. De Forest had a penchant for stumbling across the inventions of others, making inferior copies, and taking credit himself. When he showed one of his early stolen ideas at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair, he erected a 30-foot tower with DE FOREST spelled out on it.

This ruthlessness didn’t help his fortunes, with one business partnership after another falling apart in the most acrimonious ways. In one case, his partner cheated de Forest out of all the company funds and patents; in another, he narrowly avoided conviction after a lengthy fraud trial in which his partners were found guilty. “I was born to be robbed... robbed of opportunities to invent... robbed of the fruits of my years of toil,” he wailed in his diary. There was little room in his self-pity for any examination of his own intellectual pilfering.

His judgment was no better in his personal affairs. In 1908, de Forest married Nora Blatch, daughter of one of the most prominent suffragettes, and the first woman engineering graduate of Cornell - and then insisted she give up her career, leading her to divorce him after four years. Later, he would marry his fourth wife before getting around to divorcing his third.

And yet, de Forest’s accidental perfection of the vacuum tube (even he didn’t understand quite why it worked at first) laid the technological foundation for radio, and later television, and still later, the computer. He also did some of the very first radio broadcasts - the predominant idea at the time was that radio would be used to send messages over the air, as implied by the name “wireless telegraphy”, but he was thinking bigger. Infuriating though he could be, de Forest was without doubt one of the most significant figures in the most significant communication advance of his time.

Not that it did him much good. By 1930, radio was flourishing, bringing broadcast media into millions of homes worldwide for the first time - and de Forest was shut out of the bonanza, having sold all his radio interests and then lost his fortune in the stock market crash. When he turned an ear to what was being done with “his” invention, he did not like what he heard.

“Terminating the awful caterwaul”

“One tires of continually getting up from his easy-chair every little while and going over to the dial, shutting off the set, or tuning it to another station as soon as the music of a program ceases and the blatant advertiser begins to announce his wares, “ de Forest wrote in a 1930 article in the Radio News. “What the long-suffering radio user needs is a simple wireless device whereby he can instantly assassinate the advertising announcer and allow the set to resume its musical outpourings when the story of the tooth-paste or furniture salesman is terminated.”

OK, so he was no prose stylist. But de Forest was expressing an exasperation still as fresh as the latest pop-up ad you irritatedly X’ed away. Unlike most of us, he did something about it. As explained in the article, the Anti-Ad was a set-top box that would let you mute the radio for a pre-set amount of time, simply by shining a standard flashlight at it.

“When the musical program ends and the advertising agony begins, she merely picks up this flashlight, presses the button, aims this spot at the shadow-box on the Anti-Ad and presto! the relay operates, the antenna is cut off and our friend Mr. Radio Advertiser is talking into empty space, as he should be,” de Forest sniped. “One experiences a new joy not unlike that which one would experience in shooting a noisy tom-cat on the top of a back fence on a moonlight night and thus terminating the awful caterwaul.”

After “20 or 30 or 45 seconds” - whatever time the user set - the show would resume. I have no expertise to say whether de Forest’s invention would have worked, but presumably the editors of Radio News did, and found it plausible enough to publish.

So why then didn’t we all grow up with the Anti-Ad? Blame the financial imperatives of commercial broadcasting, with an assist from the inventor’s personality. Commercial radio broadcasting was initially conceived as a way to sell radios. By 1930 the ad model was firmly entrenched and growing, and the connections between radio manufacturers and radio broadcasters were still there. Little wonder that the captains of an industry didn’t build a device that would sabotage their own profits for the sake of a man they considered an abrasive crank when they thought about him at all.

Indeed, there’s no evidence the Anti-Ad ever went further than this one article and a smattering of newspaper coverage. Neither Lewis’s book nor de Forest’s own self-important 1950 autobiography, Father of Radio, even mentions it. Having gotten it out of his system, De Forest quickly moved on to other fruitless attempts to recapture his earlier success. He never stopped raging against the advertising machine - “Louder and more strident became the shrieks of [the] zealous announcers, more insistent, impudent, and repetitious [the] demands that listeners rush out forthwith to buy his merchandise, his nostrum, his laxative,” he wrote in his autobiography - before dying in relative penury in 1961.

No doubt, de Forest would not be at the top my barbecue invite list. But credit where it’s due, for how ahead of its time de Forest’s quickly forgotten invention seems now. In one swoop, it presaged the remote control, the mute button, commercial-skipping, and ad blockers. It would take decades, but eventually the rest of us would get tired enough of obnoxious ads to do something about it, too.

I think if there was a system where I’d only ever see an ad one time, I probably would actually enjoy watching ads. It’s the repetition, especially of terrible ads, that’s so painful and makes me want to block everything. I still have fond memories of the most bizarre local ads, furniture stores, carpet & tile stores, the Tik-Tok shop (whatever that was). Got any favorite quirky local ads? Let’s hear ’em (or even see ’em if you can find a YouTube link) in this week’s Shoddy Goods chat.

—Dave (and the rest of Meh)

These previous Shoddy Goods stories will not impudently shriek that readers rush out forthwith to purchase our laxative:

• The funky fashions of Flagg Bros., masters of pimp style

• The world’s finest wool comes from… the musk ox?!?

• Inventor or con-man? The case of the self-rocking crib

And if you like Shoddy Goods, don’t miss Jason’s new other newsletter, Gnomenclature. Every week he digs into the 178-year-history of Hammacher Schlemmer, America’s oddest retailer. It’s gonna get weird!

“Look here, Brothers! There’s a lot of movin’ to be done! So start making your plans to go places in RISE-ON FASHIONS.”

With ad copy like this, the name Flagg Bros. conjures up an image of super-hip, visionary brothers - presumably also “brothers” in the jive sense - building a street style empire, emblematic of rising Black confidence and purchasing power in the post-Civil Rights 1970s.

Not even close. There were no actual brothers behind Flagg Bros., by either definition. It was a brand name invented in 1936 for a division of the General Shoe Corporation. Flagg Bros. was one of the best-known shoestore chains in America for decades, peddling men’s shoes in hundreds of stores, a fixture of downtowns and shopping malls. There was nothing funky about them. They just knew a lucrative trend when they saw it.

“For the outspoken few”

The Nashville-based General Shoe Corporation launched Flagg Bros. with a store in St. Louis in December 1936, the same week they registered the trademark, and quickly expanded from coast to coast. A generation knew Flagg Bros. as a byword for “nice men’s shoes”, but it was a 1960s trend that made them cool: Beatle Boots. They didn’t make the originals but were fast enough out of the gate that no less an icon than Jimi Hendrix wore Flagg Bros. boots onstage.

In 1970, Flagg Bros. president Rob Cochran found the next big thing on the feet of the London rock ‘n’ roll demimonde when he saw the next logical step after the Cuban-heeled Beatle Boot: men’ s shoes with even higher heels. He brought some back to Tennessee, where a designer named D. Gowan Johnson created a line of shoes with heels up to 3” high.

“Our first big response came from the ethnic groups,” product manager Jack Gallager told the San Francisco Examiner, “and then the rock and rollers, the motorcyclers, and what we call ‘kooky kids’ (hippies).” The Examiner says the shoes were “test marketed on Chicago’s South Side, in the Puerto Rican neighborhoods of New York, and the Watts area of Los Angeles,” in case you were wondering which ethnic groups Gallager was talking about.

The parent company, now remained Genesco probably because “General Shoe Corporation” was too obviously villainous, was optimistic about high heels catching on with “straight kids” and even non-kids. “Swingers are getting older all the time,” Gallager said. “Age is no longer a factor. I wear them myself. I’m 46, but my wife made me get some.”

But it wasn’t bikers, hippies, and corporate executives born in the 1920s who flocked to the new styles. It was the aforementioned Black and Hispanic men. Flagg Bros. evidently realized they couldn’t talk credibly to these newly assertive, aspirational consumers the same way they would to a White audience, because their mail-order catalog and ads suddenly got a whole lot Blacker.

This streetwise audience demanded the latest and hippest, so styles evolved fast and went further out than mainstream fashion, White or Black. It wasn’t just the marketing that got more extreme: the shoes did, too. The high heels became platform soles, climbing ever higher along with Flagg Bros. revenue from Black customers.

“Get yourself into the Soul Beat”

Once Flagg Bros. had conquered shoes, they turned their attention to the rest of the outfit, adding a full fashion line in 1972. Again, the only rules were it had to be new, and it had to be bold. Nothing was off-limits, from straw hats to buffalo plaid, from animal prints to Prohibition pinstripes.

Their fashions were an even bigger hit than their shoes. “We at FLAGG know we have been giving you the top in shoe fashions,” said one ad. “But the way you’ve let us know that we really have it in clothes, too, is just beautiful… we’ve made our new catalog even bigger to feature many more man-making fashions.”

Up to this point, White companies had often been leery about being successful with Black consumers, lest their White customers think of them as “for Black people.” Flagg Bros. maintained a split personality when marketing to different races. They could advertise to Black audiences in publications like Ebony, send a mail-order catalog full of right-on vibes, and stock stores in Black neighborhoods with these flamboyant styles. Meanwhile, the White customers who shopped at other Flagg Bros. stores were largely unaware of the Superfly revolution.

There were certainly more crass examples of companies co-opting subcultural communities around this time (like “The Man can’t bust our music“). And at least Flagg Bros was serving a taste that more staid fashion houses wouldn’t go near. But it still raises some questions about the difference between exploitation and inclusion in a profit-driven economy.

Not that any of Flagg Bros. customers were troubled by such abstract concerns when they were hitting the town in head-turning ensembles like this.

“Couldn’t tell us nothin’”

By the end of the ‘70s, the pimp look was aging fast. Different looks were emerging to contend for the cutting-edge Black style of the new decade: dapper upscale formalwear, sleek and shiny futurism, and what we’d come to know as the hip-hop style of caps, sneakers, and baggier fits. None of them had any need for platform shoes or wide-brimmed hats.

To replace the funk look, Flagg Bros. put its bets on dubious new trends, including clogs and cowboy boots. It didn’t help, with either its Black or White clientele. The Ebony ads got smaller and smaller, and the famous catalog fizzled out by 1980. Their mall-store business contracted drastically in the early ‘80s, with a few stalwart stores holding out into the ‘90s before finally closing. There’s very little documentation online of Flagg Bros. in any incarnation - they don’t even have their own Wikipedia page.

But mention Flagg Bros. to Black people of a certain age and the name inspires an amused nostalgia. “Man those were the days. Double Knit Pantsuit with Bellbottoms and Stack Heel Shoes, couldn’t tell us nothin” says one Facebook reminiscer. “My big brother used to have those big, bulbous shoes and white bell bottoms around 1975-’76,” says Redditor Hey_Laaady. “His shoes were a dark purple. I thought they looked like eggplants.” The Flagg Bros. themselves might not have existed, but for a few years, the connection between people and their clothes was real.

I've mostly worn pretty straightforward fashion - to the point that if I look at what I was wearing a decade or two ago in pics, aside from some sizing/fitting issues it more or less is what I'm wearing today. Though that might just mean that I got off the fashion bus in the late 90s and am still stuck in plaid flannel and jeans land forever. (My parachute pants era was thankfully short). How about you, did you ride along with any fashion trends in the past? Let's hear about 'em in this week's Shoddy Goods chat

—Dave (and the rest of Meh)

previous Shoddy Goods stories:

• With a musk ox here and a musk ox there

• What I learned writing 100 issues of this newsletter

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

And if you like Shoddy Goods, don’t miss Jason’s new other newsletter, Gnomenclature. Every week he digs into the 178-year-history of Hammacher Schlemmer, America’s oddest retailer. It’s gonna get weird!

It’s one-eighth as fine as the finest human hair, finer than the richest cashmere. An ounce of its yarn is worth twice its weight in silver. The only animal who produces it lives exclusively in Arctic or near-Arctic latitudes, and it can only be collected from a living animal by combing a couple of months out of the year. “It’s just the softest thing you’ll ever touch,” says Mark Austin of Palmer, Alaska.

It’s qiviut, the fiber from the undercoat of the musk ox. Austin has been Executive Director of Musk Ox Farm since 2010, overseeing a herd of these woolly, willful Ice Age survivors and the annual combing that yields qiviut. (How do you pronounce qiviut? Austin suggests the rhyming mnemonic “give a hoot about qiviut.”)

Musk Ox Farm is the legacy of a 70-year experiment in domestication, launched by one guy with a vision, and the audacity and tenacity to carry out.

“A huge crazy concept”

Born in New York City in 1921, John J. Teal, Jr. earned a BA in anthropology from Harvard and a Master’s in international relations from Yale. After serving as a bomber pilot captain in World War II, he went to live with the Sámi people (formerly, and offensively, known to English speakers as “the Lapps”) of northern Norway, to study their systems of reindeer husbandry.

At some point during his three years with the Sámi, Teal started thinking about how domesticating another animal might be the key not only to economic survival for the indigenous people of Arctic North America, but to its own survival: the then-endangered musk ox.

“What he was recognizing was that a lot of indigenous people who are living in these rural remote areas were coming into this relatively new world where they had incredible wealth and abundance of food and culture and tradition,” Austin says. “What they didn’t have, and to this day still can be a challenge, is it’s very hard to find cash dollars in these isolated communities.”

Musk oxen and their predecessors had once roamed as far south as Mexico and the Mediterranean. But by 1954, their range was reduced to the most remote parts of northern Canada and Greenland. Even in Alaska, the musk ox had only recently been introduced after being wiped out around 1900.

Teal saw musk ox as a potentially lucrative source of milk, meat, and wool. He was far from the first confident adventurer to look at a wild animal and think, hey, let’s build a farm around these guys. Ill-fated attempts to domesticate zebras, hippos, and moose, among many others, had come to nothing.

“For him to decide that you’re going to get this geographically appropriate animal into agriculture to benefit people was a huge crazy concept,” Austin says. “But he did it.”

“Bearded one”

Teal’s plan was covered by Time before he’d so much as fenced in a single musk ox. The magazine sounded skeptically amused by his idea of capturing some juvenile musk oxen from Canada and raising them on a farm in Vermont. “[Musk ox] will not be a common sight in Vermont for some time,” the piece ran. “This is probably just as well.”

Doubts aside, Teal did indeed start the Musk Ox Project in Vermont. His original handful of animals successfully bred in captivity and grew. Less successful were Teal’s exploration of dairy production: musk ox just aren’t amenable to being milked. “I’m one of the very few people on this planet that’s ever milked a musk ox,” Austin says, “and let me tell you, it’s no easy thing to do.”

But their woolly undercoat turned out to be a remarkably high-quality fiber. Its zig-zag shape traps a lot of air when it’s woven together, making it one of nature’s most insulating fibers. Also unlike sheep wool, qiviut can be combed off during the April-May shedding season, and has a naturally smooth surface, so it doesn’t have the sharp edges or tiny snags that make sheep wool itchy. After a decade in Vermont, Teal knew he had something there.

It was time to head for the real frozen north and start working with the local communities, and the local musk oxen. In 1964, the Project started a new herd in Alaska, and by 1969 had helped found the Oomingmak Musk Ox Producers Coooperative as an umbrella organization to produce and market the qiviut knits crafted by Alaska Native women. “Oomingmak” is the Inupiaq word for musk ox, which translates to “bearded one”. (By the way, the once near-extinct musk oxen are now considered of “Least concern”, a conservation success story.)

“I’m sure that we can all look back and find fault in the big white guy walking in and telling people what they should do,” Austin says. “But honestly, in the era that he was doing it, he did it in a remarkably sensitive way and tried to get the populations that were living there to embrace, engage, and really take ownership of it from the beginning. I think he was ahead of his time.”

Teal died in 1982, a couple of years before Musk Ox Farm found its current home and incorporated as a nonprofit. Qiviut had proven to be his dream’s lush, crimpy lifeline.

“They’re not going to run away”

“Qiviut is obviously one of the rarest natural fibers,” Austin says. “It’s one of the warmest natural fibers. Also because it’s so fine, it’s one of the softest natural fibers. Between its softness and its fineness and its rarity, it’s very valuable. And so we are blessed as a nonprofit to largely be an earned income nonprofit. We don’t do a whole lot of begging for money.”

Not that it’s always been smooth sailing. “We’ve gone through good and bad years,” he says. “We were almost shut down in at the end of the ‘00’s, and had kind of a big reckoning to rebuild. And that’s been a very successful endeavor. The animals are living longer than we’ve ever had them live before, the healthiest, happiest animals, a great staff that’s taking care of these guys.”

As extraordinary as qiviut is, the animals themselves are what make Musk Ox Farm remarkable. Austin characterizes their demeanor as laid-back but no pushover. “These guys are a bunch of veg-heads,” he says. “They’re not out to get you. But they live in an environment in the wild where there’s no place to hide. They’re going to confront anything. They’re not going to run away from a wolf or a bear, ‘cause once they do, they expose all the soft spots. So they put the head and the shoulders and the horns up front and they’re like, all right, well, let’s do this if we’re going to do it.”

The staff of Musk Ox Farm know who the stars of the show are. An appreciative audience gets to know the 77 members of the herd through the Farm’s social media feeds and personality profiles on the website.

Every musk ox is up for virtual adoption, and the lucky few who can make the trek to Alaska can take daily tours. But Austin’s quick to emphasize that Musk Ox Farm is “not a petting zoo. We never will be. It’s not our goal. We work hard for them to become musk oxen.”

This brings up the question of whether the herd at Musk Ox Farm is really domesticated or not. “I think that the short answer one would have to say is no,” he says. “We’re a bunch of, you know, warm fuzzy bunny huggers here who put the animals first. It’s all about their comfort.”

Austin concedes that domestication is not a simple black or white question, but also a bit beside the point. “We stopped with that concept. It could be hundreds of years, it could be a thousand years before we see musk oxen with floppy ears and spots, you know, two hallmarks of domesticated animals.” The point at Musk Ox Farm, he says, is to give the animals space to be who they are.

“They spend the first several months [of their lives] learning to be a musk ox. We want them to behave like a musk ox. We want them to be a musk ox.”

Thanks to Musk Ox Farm for the photos!

If you could magically domesticate one animal, what would it be? I suppose there's 'practical' answers that would get you the most material output, whether that's fur or milk or meat or whathaveyou, but I think I'd go for the fun or cute pet angle. Like, if it was 100% domesticated in some friendly, uncruel, totally good way, I'd like a pet fennec fox. (No one should have a pet fennec fox, to be clear.) How about you, what animal would you pick to magically domesticate? Let's hear about it in this week's Shoddy Goods chat.

—Dave (and the rest of Meh)

We’re committed to keeping these previous Shoddy Goods stories wild, too:

• Ten things I learned on the way to Shoddy Goods 100

• Why Americans don’t eat lamb

• How “events” like National Pickle Week got started

When I started Shoddy Goods, it felt like pure hubris to use three-digit issue numbers. Surely the gods would take umbrage and smite me for daring to suggest my little newsletters might someday number in the hundreds. Could I stick with it that long, week-in, week-out? Were there even enough story ideas to fill a hundred issues?

Well, here we are. To mark the odometer flip - and maybe turn you on to some past stories you missed - here are ten things I’ve learned over the past couple of years rummaging around in our collective cultural overstock closet.

You never know where a story will take you

It’s a cliché for a reason. An old radio commercial for a self-rocking crib led me to the tale of a silver-mine swindle. The etymology of the word “maven” uncovered my new favorite copywriter of all time. Some swingin’ Sixties music videos drew me into the world of the mafia and Roy Cohn. And somehow the Three Stooges pop up in stories about both King Vitaman and National Pickle Week.

Ultimately, everything leads to everything else. As on James Burke’s still incredible TV show Connections, any of these stories could’ve taken me just about anywhere. It was up to me to draw the line where this story ends and another begins. Which means…

Most of this job is editing

Every week, I gather my material, outline the story, sketch in the intro, and foolishly think the end is in sight. Only then do I remember I still have to take that raw material and chip away all the parts that aren’t the story, to get it down to a length that your Inbox won’t choke on. That’s when the real work starts. And it hurts!

There’s never, ever room for all the good stuff. I’ve conducted engrossing half-hour interviews where I only wound up being able to include a few sentences. I’ve had to narrow a story’s focus on the fly because there just wasn’t room to do justice to the original idea. I’ve left fascinating digressions on the cutting-room floor. The images in this week’s issue are all outtakes from past stories. Believe me, there’s a LOT more where that came from.

There’s a wealth of material online, but nowhere near “everything”

I couldn’t do Shoddy Goods without the Internet Archive, and YouTube, and Newspapers.com, and the libraries, organizations, and magazines who’ve digitized so much of their archives. This is an extraordinary time to do research from your desk. But it gets my hackles up when people say analog material doesn’t matter because “everything is online now.”

That’s not even close to true for published books, only about 12% of which have been digitized, or feature films, an even smaller fraction of which are available to stream, rent, or buy online at any given time. So it’s even less true for the kind of throwaway ephemera this newsletter thrives on, from trade publications to candy wrappers. Fortunately…

Paper, vinyl, and tape will never die

I’ve been heartened by my conversations with people like Professor Jason Mittell and film critic Andreas Babiolakis (about whether there will ever be a new physical media format), and record-pressers Steve Lynch, Alex Stillman, and Sarah Pette (who are behind some of the new wave of vinyl plants), and Tom Evans (editor of the last print encyclopedia). Don’t start digging that grave for physical media just yet.

The more digital “everything” gets, the more important it is to reach beyond what’s already available online. I regularly use books to research these pieces, I’ve started buying old paper material from eBay, and I’m looking into the world of in-person research at real archives. The obsessive fans, packrats, and artisans who stubbornly keep “obsolete” media alive are a gift to cultural history.

Experts like to share their expertise

People who work hard to amass knowledge and create things also tend to enjoy sharing what they know. All you have to do is ask. The ones I mentioned above are only the beginning. From the maverick genius of Soviet advertising to the designer of the world’s cutest card games, from two of my favorite music writers to my former Woot colleague turned travel rewards expert, Shoddy Goods has been immeasurably enriched by the generosity of our interviewees.

Special thanks go to Dr. Arianna Dick of the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, who graciously helped me twice for stories about the lack of sugar-free candy and the future of 3D-printed food (along with her students). There are so many experts out there with stories to tell, waiting for someone to ask. If you want to do your own newsletter or podcast or whatever, just find some experts in something you’re interested in, and start asking.

For some people, commerce is an art form

Cards on the table: I’m an extreme skeptic of consumer capitalism, and even more skeptical of the over-veneration of entrepreneurs and executives. The system is way out of whack in their favor, in terms of both material rewards and social power, and correcting that imbalance is essential if the world’s current mess of other problems will ever be solved.

But just as you don’t have to be Catholic to see the beauty in the Sistine Chapel ceiling, I can recognize that in a commercial age, commerce is the vehicle for a significant number of talented people to express their urge to create. Stories like Orville Redenbacher’s quest for the perfect popcorn kernel and Keene Dimick’s invention of the exercise bike capture that restless visionary impulse that any artist will recognize.

Advertising is a powerful but cracked lens

I always chuckle when somebody on the Internet posts an old ad depicting some idealized ‘50s scene, and calls on us to “bring this back.” My brother in Brylcreem, that shit ain’t real. But then neither are fairy tales, superheroes, or jokes. They can still tell us a lot about the values and assumptions of their time.

Admen put a lot of effort and money into understanding what would move their audience, and those insights are embodied in the ads. Old ads can also shed light on the commercial calculations that went into creating phenomena that have lasted into our time, from chronic halitosis to the coffee break. And they’re great-looking ways to break up the visual monotony of a 1500-word newsletter, heh.

Don’t believe everything you read

Peanut butter kisses were not invented by the Mary Jane company and Hallmark did not invent wrapping paper, even though Google AI says otherwise. The Oxford English Dictionary traces the term “cough drop” back to 1851; I found “cough drop” in newspapers back to at least 1798. And I recently read a novel that I loved, set in the 1940s, where a character uses the term “training wheels” - alas, training wheels weren’t invented until the 1950s.

I’m not a “do my own research” type. But finding these tidbits is always a fun reminder that the conventional wisdom doesn’t know everything, and there’s always more to discover.

You (almost) never know what stories will be hits

I’m grateful for any readership and proud of all our stories. But when I look at our most popular issues, I notice they don’t overlap much with my favorites. I really thought the LEGO legions would flock to the story of LEGO by Samsonite. I expected the gruesome mystery meats of failed Spam imitators would draw a crowd, and that the ‘80s kids would line up to celebrate 50 years of the Big Gulp, remember the Great Fruit Scares of 1989, and reminisce about how the color of the ‘80s was brown. Shows what I know!

There’s one high-ranking story that I was pretty sure would find an audience, though: my mini-memoir of working at Woot. For whatever reasons, people are still interested in that time and place. Yeah, me too.

There are enough stories for infinite newsletters

The more stories I find, the more I realize how many more stories are still out there for to me find. Maybe my real mistake was not adding a thousands digit to the Shoddy Goods issue numbers. I’ll get back to you about that in 2043.

Huh. Wow. One hundred issues! Those of you who have been getting ’em all, got any favorites? Anything you learned or that led you to dig into something you hadn’t before? While we’re at it, any thoughts on something you’d love to see covered in the next 100? Let’s hear about it in this week’s Shoddy Goods chat.

—Dave (and the rest of Meh)

After all that, as if anyone needs more links to previous Shoddy Goods stories:

• Car brochures fade into the rearview

• You bet your sweet Aspercreme this was a real commercial

• When water guns got a little too realistic

And if you like Shoddy Goods, don’t miss Jason’s new other newsletter, Gnomenclature. Every week he digs into the 178-year-history of Hammacher Schlemmer, America’s oddest retailer. It’s gonna get weird!

Last year I bought a car, which meant I spent time in car dealerships for the first time in years. And I noticed something there - or rather, something that wasn’t there: brochures. I don’t know why I was surprised. Like all the other paper ephemera of the 20th century, of course they’ve largely been replaced by websites, apps, and PDFs.

But I guess I thought anything as expensive as a car would still be sold with a premium-feeling piece of printed matter. When my dad sold cars in the early ‘80s, I remember leafing through a stack of brochures he’d brought home for various Toyota models. I didn’t really care about the cars. I was a sucker for the color-coordinated, collect-’em-all feel - an appeal I would later find in things where I also loved the content, like comic books and baseball cards.

Such brochures tickled the collector-bone for a lot people, it turns out. A legion of amateur archivists is preserving the history of the car brochure digitally, right as the printed car brochure itself becomes history.

Ignition

The automotive brochure as we know it was a product of two trends. One was the development of mass color printing. which fell steeply in price and improved sharply in quality through the first half of the 20th century. The other was planned obsolescence in automotive design, which led to the concept of the model year.

The original car companies just made the same models for as long as they felt like it. The Ford Model T stayed basically identical from 1908 to 1927. And if automakers did make changes, they didn’t follow a schedule or necessarily even make a big deal about it. It wasn’t until the early 1920s that General Motors President Alfred P. Sloan introduced annual styling changes, with the rest of the industry following suit in the 1930s.

After the disruptions of World War II, the annual ad campaigns for each model year really began in earnest. How to drum up excitement around design and engineering tweaks that often ranged from minor to imperceptible? By wrapping them in a whole creative concept, from slogans to visual aesthetics, as different from last year’s campaign as the cars themselves were the same.

Into high gear

The 1950s is when car brochures became a fully integrated part of the companies’ annual ad campaigns. If a magazine ad or a TV commercial lured you into a dealership, you could take home a brochure with the same look and sales pitch. GM’s head start meant theirs were the most elaborately produced at first, but other manufacturers soon caught up.

Honestly, it’s hard to find a car brochure from the ‘50s or ‘60s that isn’t at least charming, and often spectacular. These were treated with the same seriousness as the rest of the companies’ advertising, with elaborate photo shoots or artwork by the premier commercial illustrators of the time. I could have included ten times more in this post that all look as good as these.

Aesthetics changed quickly - that was the whole point - but the form itself remained remarkably stable, decade after decade. Even if a luxury manufacturer like Ferrari or Rolls-Royce might dress theirs up with a hard cover and premium paper, at heart, the car brochure stayed itself: a couple of dozen pages of a marketing story, with slick graphics and spec details.

End of the line?

Then came the Internet. As of 2026, auto manufacturers do still produce brochures, but distribute them almost entirely as PDFs. It’s extremely unlikely you’ll walk into a dealership and see them fanned out on a table. As with other casualties of the print wipeout, like paper maps and printed encyclopedias, you can probably get a paper brochure if you’re determined to. But there are going to be a lot fewer of them floating around for future generations to stumble upon.

Because yes, there will be at least a few people among those generations who would enjoy that. There’s a healthy market in vintage car brochures on eBay, with particularly coveted ones trading hands for three-figure prices. And luckily for me, a few determined enthusiasts have assembled online collections like Love to Accelerate, the Old Car Manual Project, and the Auto Catalog Archive. Thanks to all of them for the images in this story. If you’ve read this far, you’ll enjoy losing yourself in those pages.

As for future retronauts digging for information about the cars of the 2020s? I hope someone somewhere is filling up a hard drive with all those PDFs the automakers are putting out now.

I had the cheesiest possible framed picture in my room. No, not my Paula Abdul picture, I'm still not embarrassed by that. It was a mansion on a hill with a garage that had a Lamborghini Countach, Ferrari F40, and Porsche 959 parked in it, above the words "justification for higher education." Ugh. Did you have any exotic cars or other luxury material possessions you dreamt of one day owning? Let's talk about 'em in this week's Shoddy Goods chat.

—Dave (and the rest of Meh)

These previous Shoddy Goods stories are also unavailable in print form… for now:

• You bet your sweet Aspercreme this commercial was real

• Schlitz is dead but the party in these ‘50s ads never ends

• How French cars failed to break America

And if you like Shoddy Goods, don’t miss Jason’s new other newsletter, Gnomenclature. Every week he digs into the 178-year-history of Hammacher Schlemmer, America’s oddest retailer. It’s gonna get weird!

Did I hear that right? It was 2005. I was watching Jeopardy! The game had just ended with the Final Jeopardy reveal. As Alex and the contestants started their postgame small talk, Johnny Gilbert intoned “Promotional consideration provided by…” to introduce those frantic little mini-commercials they cram in before the closing credits.

So far, so normal. My attention drifted… what should we make for dinner?... until a cheerful male chorus belted out what sounded like “You bet your sweet Aspercreme.” Now they had my attention. At the end of the 15-second spot, there it was again. They were definitely singing “You bet your sweet Aspercreme”, with the slogan shown on the screen for good measure. I thought it was hilarious myself, and a little daring, even by the sleazy standards of 2000s pop culture.

But then, maybe a week later, the otherwise identical spot had the same jolly fellows singing the far lamer slogan “You bet if it’s Aspercreme.” The commercial’s short run, and the absurd juxtaposition of a pain-relief patch playing with naughty words in their commercials, would give rise to a second life on the Internet, both as a catchphrase and as a dimly remembered Mandela effect candidate. I’m here to tell you it was real. Unfortunately, that’s all I can tell you.

Maximum strength

The ad itself is mostly a forgettable example of a stock-standard medicinal commercial: aching body parts, pulsing animated waves of relief, and regular folks enjoying a newly pain-free life. A typical 2000s announcer feeds us a line about how the Aspercreme Back & Body Patch is “the first and only maximum-strength patch with concentrated relief to knock out the pain.”

The generic vibe, and the inherent mundanity of the product itself, is what makes the childish joke of the slogan hit so hard. It just wouldn’t be as funny in a zany commercial for some wacky product. It’s not a work of genius because of the dumb pun so much as making this dumb pun in this square, tepid context.

Adding to the incongruous impact is its placement crammed in that cluster of 15-second spots right before the closing credits. It’s a no-man’s-land that no man ever pays attention to, one final nakedly desperate grab for your attention. It’s the last place you’d expect any surprise or cleverness. What’s remarkable is that anyone bothered to try. It’s the same dynamic that would be exploited by the inert headache placebo Head On for viral fame a year later.

And then it was gone. Although “ass” was already commonplace on prime-time TV, this winking almost-curse was a step too far for somebody. But who?

“I thought I was going insane”

Did viewers complain? Did the game show producers get cold feet? Did some executive at Chattem, Inc., which owned Aspercreme, get embarrassed when a golf buddy ribbed him about it?

I have no idea. I’ve gotten reasonably good at tracking down stories behind things like this, of following threads of evidence through various sources. But unlike other ‘00s icons of left-field advertising like the well-documented Spongmonkeys for Quizno’s, “You bet your sweet Aspercreme” got no media coverage that I can find. No announcement of the campaign’s launch or the decision to pull it. No news stories about a consumer uproar or FCC warning.

I reached out to a copywriter who worked on Aspercreme; this campaign was before his time. I contacted a creative agency I found mentioned in association with Aspercreme during the 2000s. They never responded. If by any chance you worked on this campaign or know someone who did, email me, please!

The memory-holing of this short-lived tagline was so total, its very existence fell into dispute. Blogger Katie A. O’Reilly wrote in 2014: “For years, I have been convinced that I once heard an ad for a product whose tagline ran ‘You bet your sweet Aspercreme.’ I only heard it once, but I loved it. I told my brothers about it, but the ad was so quickly updated with a new tagline, neither of them ever saw it, and believed I was making it up.”

Way back in 2007, an Ain’t It Cool commenter named exofficersmith said “I saw them twice and then never again, and thought I was going insane.” More recently, Threads user caroline.gadbury pleaded “Please tell me someone saw the Aspercreme commercial ‘You bet your sweet ASSpercreme!’” Only when the commercial resurfaced on YouTube was the debate put to rest.

But among those who did remember, “You bet your sweet Aspercreme” found a new life as a catchphrase. It’s been dropped in discussions of everything from Hulk Hogan to the card game UNO to the relative merits of bullet types to, of course, advertising taglines that take up permanent residence in your brain. An Indiana theme-park owner quoted it as her favorite ad slogan in the August 2016 issue of Amusement Today magazine. And YA fantasy writer Anna Banks had one of her characters say it in the mermaid romance novel Of Triton.

Even Aspercreme, under their new owners Sanofi, has softened their stance. In 2021, they debuted their “Kick pain in the Aspercreme“ campaign. It just goes to prove that you can suppress it, you can doubt it, you can try to bury it, but you can’t keep a bad pun down.

What weird ads from your childhood are locked in your head forever? “588-2 three-hundred, Empire!” is a jingle I’ll never forget, though until I just looked I had no idea they sold carpeting. Got any favorites, good or terrible? Let’s hear ‘em in this week’s Shoddy Goods chat.

—Dave (and the rest of Meh)

Get your Aspercreme in gear and apply these previous Shoddy Goods stories directly to the forehead:

• Schlitz is disappearing, but these classic Schlitz ads never go flat

• When water guns looked a little too real

• One former Gap employee’s quest to collect all their instore playlists

And if you like Shoddy Goods, don’t miss Jason’s new other newsletter, Gnomenclature. Every week he digs into the 178-year-history of Hammacher Schlemmer, America’s oddest retailer. It’s gonna get weird!

American brewing is losing one of its greatest names, if not always one of its greatest beers. The final barrel of Schlitz will roll off the line this week in Milwaukee, the town it made famous. Pabst, its current owner, is retiring the brand. It’s the end of a legacy that goes back to 1849, and includes the first brown beer bottles (in 1912) and a two-decade run as the best-selling beer in America (from the end of Prohibition to the 1950s).

“The beer that made MIlwaukee famous” isn’t the only ad pitch Schlitz made famous. Saturation campaigns made slogans like “When you’re out of Schlitz, you’re out of beer“ and “Beer makes it good, Schlitz makes it great“, and the Schlitz Mall Liquor Bull, inescapable across several Presidential administrations.

But for my beer money, none of those can hoist a stein to the “Schlitzerland”magazine ads of the late 1950s. They’ve given me more smooth, rich enjoyment than the beer itself ever did.

Mama deserves a Schlitznight off

There were two basic ideas behind the campaign, which ran in 1957. One, no sociable activity is complete without Schlitz. Two, the word “Schlitz” was an all-purpose prefix to brand any quality or activity more fun than its usual, non-beer-soaked form.

A get-together is a Schlitztogether. A housewarming is a Schlitzwarming. You’re not thirsty, you’re Schlitzthirsty. Your pals are your Schlitzfellows. And this lifestyle is called Schlitzing. It’s a linguistic technique that the Smurfs would adopt in later decades.

Schlitzverbalizing aside, what makes the ads so charming is the art. Under the creative direction of the J. Walter Thompson ad agency, the Schlitz account retained the use of illustrators after most of its competitors had switched to photography. And oh, what illustrators.

While previous campaigns had mostly been in a lushly realistic painted style, the Schlitzerland artwork matched the verbal whimsy of the campaign with lighthearted work by Jan Balet and Frederick Siebel. These were guys who could both illustrate classic children’s books, and convincingly capture the bonhomie that flowed along with bottomless gallons of frosty, frothy Schlitz.

Schlitzerland extended to TV, too, with commercials whisking you away to “The Schlitzteenth Hole” and a “Schlitzparty at our house”. The animation style was necessarily simplified from the ad art, but at least those of us who can’t read music were able to hear the jingle transcribed at the bottom of every ad.

Fresh air makes the Schlitzthirst grow

Whether these ads caused it or coincided with it, Schlitz sales went up in 1957, to 6.1 million barrels from 5.9 million the previous year. After losing its “best selling” crown to Budweiser a few years prior, the Milwaukee brew had the St. Louis upstart in its sights again… which may have been its undoing. The cartoony conviviality of Schlitzerland was dropped for a (to my mind) blandly safe approach, emphasizing the “Move up to quality” tagline and generic mountain vistas in the artwork.

It didn’t work. Schlitz sales continued dropping until, in 1961, the company dropped J. Walter Thompson. The two would work together again, but Schlitz would never regain its post-Prohibition commercial supremacy. It would be taken over by Stroh in 1981, its Milwaukee brewery closed, the Schlitz name reduced to a nostalgic label on an indifferent procession of cut-price beers. Ironically, the final barrels that Wisconsin Brewing Co. produces this week will be the first Schlitz brewed in its famous hometown in over 40 years.

But wait… there is some precedent for Schlitz fans to hope it will be back. Back in 2008, Pabst, under previous ownership was the savior of the original Schlitz, reviving the beer’s long-lost recipe from its glory days. These days, it’s hard to imagine any beloved legacy brand - especially one that dates back to the 1840s - lying dormant for long. What, after all, is the difference between Schlitz and Shinola?

In the meantime, we’ll always have Schlitzerland. Anywhere a man attends a suburban barbecue or a bowling alley in lederhosen, for some reason, the Schlitzfest rollicks on.

This kind of makes me wish I had more Schlitz nostalgia than I really do because Shlitzland sounds amazing. What lost brand do you still miss? In the middle of weeding the garden or unloading groceries, "I'm a Toys R Us Kid" will pop in my head, with that fleeting feeling of walking into the giant toy store, looking around, and thinking everything is possible (even if I couldn't quite get much of anything on my meager allowance). What long gone brand still sticks with you? Let's hear about it in this week's Shoddy Goods chat.

—Dave (and the rest of Meh)

Shoddy Goods Schlitzreaders will Schlitzenjoy these previous Schlitzstories (none of which have anything to do with Schlitz):

• The dastardly Mr. Coffee Nerves, scourge of the overcaffeinated

• Where’s the Speef? And other pretenders to the Spam throne

• When hyperrealistic toy guns freaked out ‘80s America

And if you like Shoddy Goods, don’t miss Jason’s new other newsletter, Gnomenclature. Every week he digs into the 178-year-history of Hammacher Schlemmer, America’s oddest retailer. It’s gonna get weird!

“The look! The feel! The sound! So real!” Forty years later, the 1986 commercial for Entertech water guns is a little unnerving: all-American suburban kids toting authentic-looking automatic weapons. Maybe we’ve seen too many real-life child soldiers since then. Or maybe we’ve just gotten used to toy guns having gaudy, obviously unrealistic colors - a shift Entertech played a major role in instigating.

Entertech wasn’t the only realistic toy-gun line at the time. But the manufacturer, LJN Toys, staked the entire brand on the resemblance to real deadly weapons. When the mood abruptly shifted after some high-profile tragic incidents, the Entertech name lost its value, its reason for being, and its existence.

“The play value is tremendous”

I was the target market for these water guns. Twelve years old at the time, I was still young enough to run around playing make-believe but old enough to crave some edge, some realism. I wasn’t even that into the Stallone/Schwarzenegger brand of action - my tastes ran more to superheroes and Indiana Jones - but come on: those Entertech guns looked awesome.

US sales of toy guns - “war toys”, in pacifist parlance - had dropped steeply through the first half of the decade, from 33 million units in 1980 to 19 million in 1985. The generation that marched against Vietnam were hesitant to put toy guns in the hands of their kids. Consumer advocates had opened up discussions in the 1970s about the connections between pretend violence and the real thing. But as the post-hippie generation grew up and had kids of their own, there was less of a stigma against toy guns.

“I think today’s parents may be less averse to guns than many suspect,” said industry analyst Paul Valentine in 1986, “because they generally missed the height of the anti-war movement of the late ‘60s and they generally were not affected by the draft.” The same trends that made Rambo box-office gold showed up in the toy aisle, too, including licensed Rambo toys by at least three different companies, including LJN.

New technology also made toy guns a hot commodity. Worlds of Wonder’s Lazer Tag made it possible to play “for real”, with points and confirmed kills, and rapid-fire water guns like Entertech brought the chugga-chugga of action-movie battlefields to the backyard.

“The motorized water machine gun category is one that we think is going to grow,” said Leo Hoffman, LJN’s director of marketing, in the same news story. “The product has really universal appeal. The play value is tremendous, really.”

My friends and I would have agreed, if any of us had been lucky enough to have an Entertech. Authentic-looking M-16s and Uzis with automatic bursts of “fire”, 30-foot range, changeable water-filled “clips”... what’s not to love?

“Children have a built-in gun”

Of course, just because kids want something doesn’t mean it’s the best idea to give it to them. The toy industry at the time did what industries do: shrug off any responsibility for the even the possibility of harm from their products.

“We don’t create the trend in the market,” said Steven Kort, VP of marketing for a toy company that marketed a replica Baretta dart gun called “The Real Stuff”. “We just react. And we know that right now, the more realistic, the better.”

Penny Richmond, publicist for the Toy Manufacturers of America, said “”We don’t consider any of the guns or action toys ‘war toys’. Look, children have a built-in gun - they cock two fingers of one hand and bang-bang, they shoot their little brother or whatever. Kids have been doing that since ancient time.”

Richmond’s questionable grasp of firearm history aside, there was an issue that had nothing to do with flower-power notions of teaching the children peace: sometimes people mistake toy guns for the real thing.

In a society with high levels of gun ownership, at a time when violent crime levels had been climbing for 25 years, that mistake could have disastrous consequences. And so it did. In truth, people toting play firearms had been getting shot well before Entertech came along. The victims were largely witless adults brandishing toy guns in robberies or disputes, only to find the other party was armed with the real thing: this actually happened to a teenage friend of my dad who pulled a squirt gun on a nightclub bouncer as a “joke”. But the casualties had also always included a few children. The main difference was that now more kids were running around with realistic toy guns because kids’ TV shows were inundated with commercials hawking them.

Living colors

So when a 13-year-old developmentally disabled boy in San Francisco was shot by police while playing with a toy gun, or a 19-year-old was killed by police during a game of Lazer Tag - not to mention countless near misses when police were called on kids with toy guns, from LA to Boston to West Virginia - the very conspicuous likes of Entertech found themselves in the figurative crosshairs.

Los Angeles became the first city government to ban realistic toy guns in 1987, with San Francisco following in 1988. Various cities and states joined in, with lawmakers considering federal-level bans. So the industry acted itself before it could be forced to. Led by retailers like Toys R Us, which banned realistic toy guns in 1988, toymakers shifted away from black and gray replicas of real firearms to big bulbous sci-fi contraptions in hi-vis shades of orange, green, and yellow.

Entertech tried to go along with the change, but now they were just one more motorized water gun in an ocean full of them. Their sales collapsed to essentially zero. After LJN was acquired by Acclaim Entertainment and converted into a video-game company, the Entertech trademark was allowed to lapse.

As you may have noticed, depending on where you live, realistic toy guns never went completely away in the US. Authorities from Mississippi to Massachusetts have recently warned of the dangers of toy guns being mistaken for the real thing. Last year, New York sued Walmart for shipping some realistic toy guns into the state, violating the state’s ban. But no doubt lives have been saved by the dayglo designs of toy guns over the last 40ish years.

Look, I get the appeal. 12-year-old Jason would have loved an Entertech Uzi. But he also would have loved an all-Big Mac diet, unlimited Little Debbies, and a 3 AM-noon sleep schedule. It’s a good sign that seeing little kids with toy Uzis seems just that unwholesome now.

I have a specific memory, growing up, of a law getting passed that dictated that as of January 1985 throwing stars were going to be 18+ only. Throwing star sales went through the roof that December, 1984. What else were we going to throw around in the construction sites we trespassed in? What toys or clothes were banned, legally, parentally, or in schools during your childhood? Let's hear about 'em in this week's Shoddy Goods chat.

—Dave (and the rest of Meh)

Nobody would ever mistake these previous Shoddy Goods stories for a lethal weapon:

• Who came up with “holidays” like National Pickle Week?

• The poisoned fruit panic of 1989

• 50 years of the Big Gulp, the fountain soda that changed America

And if you like Shoddy Goods, don’t miss Jason’s new other newsletter, Gnomenclature. Every week he digs into the 178-year-history of Hammacher Schlemmer, America’s oddest retailer. It’s gonna get weird!

“Who comes up with this stuff?” That’s the common and understandable reaction when confronted with some contrived commercial occasion like National Pickle Week, or National Macaroni Week, or National Kraut & Frankfurter Week.

Most of us understand vaguely that the answer is “somebody in advertising.” But thanks to a cache of vintage food photos I bought on eBay, I stumbled onto at least one name - the guy whose agency came up with all three of those “celebrations” I mentioned, and plenty more. As I dug into the story, a picture came together of how consumer PR worked in the analog age: a few dependable attention-getting ideas repeated over and over, and backed up by lots of grind-it-out gruntwork.

“A hearty potful”

“1950s 60s Professional Advertising Food Photographs” jumped out at me when I was browsing vintage ad listings on eBay. I’d never bought anything like that before, but the full-color 8x10s in the listing photos looked gorgeous, and I thought I might get a newsletter idea out of it.

The photos arrived, as spectacular as advertised. Especially interesting were the slips of paper taped to the backs of the photos. In typewriter script, each one carried a caption like “Celebrate National Kraut and Frankfurter Week with a hearty potful of Kraut and Frankfurter Stew” under the name and New York address of Theodore R. Sills and Company. Also listed was the client for whom the Sills company was speaking: in the above case, something called the National Kraut Packers Association.

These were press photos sent out to newspapers to get the client’s products featured in food and homemaking pages. Other clients in this packet included outfits like the National Macaroni Institute, the Louisiana Yam Commission, Western Iceberg Lettuce, and the Carnation Company. And it was clear that “National Whatever Week” was one of Theodore R. Sills and Company’s favorite tactics.

So this got me curious about the Sills outfit. It turns out that this random eBay find was just the tip of the iceberg lettuce.

Long live the Pickle Queen

“Packers preach their product’s perfection with a peck of publicity,” said the tongue-twisting LIFE Magazine headline in 1949. The occasion was National Pickle Week, “celebrated” in Chicago with events ranging from presentations on pickle classification to a pickle parade. A man whose name was actually Dill Pickle was recruited to recline in a giant vat of pickle brine. The event’s crowning moment (literally) was the coronation of a Pickle Queen. Her royal duties included posing with the Three Stooges and a giant pickle.

This pucker-inducing party was the brainchild of Theodore R. Sills. His Chicago public relations firm had been contracted by the National Pickle Packers Association to get their product some media attention. It wasn’t Sills’s first trip to this particular well. I assume the NPPA hired him based on his success a year or two prior with the National Kraut Packers Association, launching National Kraut and Frankfurter Week.

That mouthful of gimmickry won unlikely attention from content-hungry newspapers nationwide. Eventually Sills would add a smorgasbord of grocery clients to those already mentioned, including the Tuna Research Foundation, Sunshine Biscuits, the Paper Plate Association, and the wonderfully ridiculous Chocolate Milk Research Foundation.

Sills had left his job as ad manager for a carpet company to found his own firm in 1933. After representing the steel industry during wartime labor negotiations in 1942, Sills acquired enough prominence in the field to co-write a PR textbook with Philip Lesly. He doesn’t specifically mention national food weeks in Public Relations: Principles and Procedures (1945). But you can see the blueprint Sills would soon follow in his advice on effective “stunts” (his word):

“Contests of all sorts, anniversary celebrations, and Fifty Year clubs are common vehicles for injecting reader appeal into efforts to put over a point. More and more, pictures are becoming the controlling factor of publicity activities... Today the story that is most likely to reach a widely circulated publication and achieve a clear-cut effect on the reader is based on good photographs. Every idea for a story must be approached with the question: ‘What are the picture possibilities?’”

Every “week” involved a Herculean job of organizing parades, beauty contests, cook-offs, celebrity appearances, industry conventions, and photogenic gimmicks, often with children and/or animals. Professional food photography had to be staged, shot, and printed. Press kits had to be organized and sent out, and then someone had to follow up with those editors, one by one, back when long distance meant long distance.

Sills, or his team, also came up with narrative hooks for their products, like the claim that workers wouldn’t have been able to build the Great Wall of China without the healthful properties of sauerkraut. And statistics, like that Americans consumed 194 million gallons of chocolate milk in 1956. And practical ideas, like a “Macaroni Money-Maker” supper as a church fundraiser. If you were a “Ladies’ Editor” who needed column inches filled, Theodore Sills was your man.

Let us now praise nurses and hoagies

He knew what he was doing. Sills-promoted occasions like National Macaroni Week and National Pickle Week remained annual promo staples for decades, and the approach itself has grown far beyond what he could’ve imagined. Literally not a day goes by that isn’t part of dozens of such observations, from the serious and worthy to the purely silly. The day this hits your inbox (May 5), it’s both National Nurses Week and National Hoagie Day. Buy your favorite nurse a hoagie today.

Over a long career, Sills did well enough to endow a journalism professorship at Northwestern University in his will. He died in the year 2000 at the age of 96.

He didn’t necessarily invent the “national week” concept: I couldn’t pinpoint when local produce festivals first mutated into coordinated national publicity campaigns. Good PR people stayed in the background so it’s hard to track them down now. But now we know Theodore R. Sills was one of the guys who “came up with this stuff”. Funny what can happen when something catches your eye on eBay.

What food and nutrition 'commercials' do you most remember growing up? It always seemed weird to me to advertise milk. Like...milk seems like just a substance on Earth, not a product to push. And yet, milk mustache ads every Saturday morning and in every magazine. I remember cheese ads, too, though I may need some help remembering the slogan. Remember any other weird foods being pushed in between your cartoons? Let's hear 'em in this week's Shoddy Goods chat.

—Dave (and the rest of Meh)

Celebrate National Shoddy Goods Week with these delicious stories:

• The Mystery of UFO candy

• Did the Nothing Box help break up the Beatles?

• Why Americans don’t eat lamb

And if you like Shoddy Goods, don’t miss Jason’s new other newsletter, Gnomenclature. Every week he digs into the 178-year-history of Hammacher Schlemmer, America’s oddest retailer. It’s gonna get weird!

I’m just old enough to remember all those old-timey candies that seemed more like industrial waste byproducts. Bland flavors, off-putting colors, challenging textures… isn’t candy supposed to be fun? We’ve talked about peanut butter kisses before; Bit o’ Honey and Necco Wafers also had a distinct “extrusion leftovers” vibe. Most baffling of them all have to be the pastel pods of disillusionment known variously as flying saucers, satellite wafers, UFOs, or, in the Dutch of their native Flanders, zure ouwels (”sour wafers”).

The completely flavorless rice-paper shell has the mouthfeel of Styrofoam, at least for the first two seconds after making contact with your saliva, before it dissolves into a pasty goo. Inside is either a mouthful of candy powder (more common in Europe) or a bunch of rock-hard, also almost flavorless round sprinkles (the American style). Mmm, mushy and gritty! OK, the colors are nice. But otherwise it’s hard to understand how any part of this experience is meant to be pleasant.

Or maybe it’s just me. Flying saucers were named the 12th most favorite sweet in Britain in a 2009 survey, and they’re officially considered a Flemish heritage product in the Belgian region where they were invented. But while I grudgingly admit they may not be actual factory debris, satellite wafers did start out as a product made for a completely different reason. They were only repurposed as “sweets” for kids when nobody else wanted them.

Last communion

Like all the most fun candies, this one starts with the decline of Western European religious belief following World War II. It seems a venerable firm in Antwerp, Belgium called Belgica was having trouble selling the communion wafers they produced. So in 1951, they hit on the idea of putting two wafers together into a round capsule. Inside, they were filled with a sour candy powder, a then-popular candy genre which also showed up in the US as products like Lik-M-Aid Fun Dip (speaking of low-effort industrial sweets). Ziezo! Zure ouwels were born.

I guess wartime austerity had done a number on the European sweet tooth, because this ascetic treat was embraced by a grateful continent. In the UK and Ireland, these flying saucers were filled with sherbet powder, a fizzier concoction. The American version changed that filling to multicolored nonpareils, tiny round sprinkles that also feature as the “snow” on Sno-Caps. I don’t recommend them to anyone who would like to keep their real teeth.

In my dim memories of the turn of the 1970s into the 1980s, flying saucers still haunted the dusty shelves of old-school corner stores, along with other superannuated candy you never saw commercials for: Swedish fish, candy buttons, candy necklaces, wax “cola bottles”, wax lips. Somebody back then was really trying to get kids to eat wax for some reason.

Like its peers, flying saucers faded as big-budget candy brands crowded them out, and the candy stores and neighborhood markets that carried them disappeared. And then they made a bit of a comeback in the 2000s as a retro-sweets trend was driven by indie vintage candy shops, newfound availability on the Internet, and Boomer/Gen X nostalgia.

Now Amazon will deliver a drum of Fizzy UFOs to your door. But opinions about this bastard offspring of church and industry remain, let’s say, mixed.

“I have no idea why anyone buys these”

In a video titled “The Most Boring Candy Ever“, a singularly unenthused YouTube reviewer raves “It was about time that I try this candy I have zero interest in… it smells like packing peanuts… it’s literally flavorless sugary sprinkle beads in a flavorless non-sugary wafer… I would love to meet the person that says this is their favorite candy.”

A commenter adds, “When I worked at World Market, they were trying to get rid of these for at least a year and nobody would buy them even at 50% off.”

Elsewhere in retail: “A sweet in our store that I have no idea why anyone buys: flying saucers,” concurs someone from the Scottish candy store Joe’s Sweetie Barn on Instagram. “Sherbet on the inside, rice paper on the outside. Overall, just bland.” And this is from a store that sells them.

Flying saucers do have their fans - 49% of Britons can’t all be lying. “I genuinely don’t care what people say, these are so good,” says Redditor Crow-Time, turning a bug into a feature. “It’s like communion wafers with sprinkles inside, I love it.” But even there, the comments are overwhelmingly along the lines of “Think of chewing on a packing peanut minus the thickness with a little bit of ice cream hard ball sprinkles inside. There is zero sweetness and zero taste in the disc itself.”

If you swear by flying saucers, I’m baffled, but also a little jealous. I wish I had the ability to be happy with so little. I wish my tastebuds weren’t blown out by decades of fructose abuse. I wish I could strike the contrarian pose that flying saucers are “good, actually.” Part of me wants to connect on that visceral level with our forebears from a simpler time. But that part is definitely not my tongue.

I think the powdery chalkiness of the candy hearts on Valentine's Day are my most "pretty gross but I still fondly remember them" candies. What food do you have nostalgia for despite objectively having to admit it doesn't actually taste good? Let's hear about it in this week's Shoddy Goods chat.

—Dave (and the rest of Meh)

We promise these previous Shoddy Goods stories aren’t that much like biting into a packing peanut:

• The mystery of peanut butter kisses

• The Beatles and the Nothing Box

• Are cough drops medicine or candy?

And if you like Shoddy Goods, don’t miss Jason’s new other newsletter, Gnomenclature. Every week he digs into the 178-year-history of Hammacher Schlemmer, America’s oddest retailer. It’s gonna get weird!

Oh, the stories Hammacher Schlemmer could tell… that’s why Gnomenclature exists. Every week, we’ll rummage through the deep, dense substrata of our 178-year history to tell the best stories from Hammacher’s past and present.

What makes me, as the writer with that assignment, positively salivate is all the ways Hammacher Schlemmer connected to the very heights of pop culture through the 20th century. Those heights don’t get much higher than the Beatles. And it’s just about possible that we inadvertently contributed to the breakup of the greatest band of all time. Oops.

“It blinks and that’s all”

“It’s for the man who wants nothing and is ready to pay a good, stiff price for it,” Hammacher Schlemmer president Dominic Tampone told the New Yorker in 1962. He was talking about the Nothing Box, a six-pound metal box festooned with eight small lights that blinked in a random, meaningless sequence. “Sells for twenty-five dollars,” he continued (about $265 today), “and we expect to dispose of a thousand of them by Christmas Day.”

The catalog copy for the Nothing Box stresses its complete lack of features or, indeed, purpose. “It blinks and that’s all… Let us warn you that unless you use an axe you can’t turn it off. It will keep on winking its 8 eyes in no recognizable pattern and for no apparent reason for nearly a year. Then it’s dead as a mackeral and you can’t get it fixed.”

The New Yorker had questions. What else did it do? Nothing. What did it all mean? Nothing. What was the point? The fun of wondering what the point is, of letting your mind conjure up its own narrative about what’s going on. “The box seems to give back every bit as much as you put into it,” Tampone said. “I find myself talking to it now and then, and the lights seem to respond. In my imagination, it tells me what’s doing on the main floor, the second floor, the third, and so on. It gives an executive like me an executive feeling—a sense of being in charge, of being on top of things.”

As Hammacher Schlemmer’s deepest excursion into pure dada absurdism, the Nothing Box was years ahead of its time. And it would soon attract the attention of another famous creative innovator with a taste for the silly and surreal.

Along comes a guru

John Lennon was captivated. One of the “kinetic light sculptures” on display at the Indica Gallery in London in early 1966 was a simple box with eight flashing lights. This “Nothing Box” tickled the famed Beatle’s sense of absurdity and he bought one on the spot. One of his friends, either Rolling Stones guitarist Brian Jones or gallery owner John Dunbar, introduced him to the (supposed) artist, Yannis Alexis Mardas, or Alex for short.

The 23-year-old son of a Greek military officer turned on his apparently considerable charm. Lennon was impressed by Mardas’s big ideas, like wallpaper with speakers built into it, or a typewriter that could automatically transcribe music - all redolent of the far-out early-psychedelic atmosphere of Swinging London. He dubbed Mardas “Magic Alex”, called him his “guru”, and started spending hours at a time tripping on LSD and staring at the Nothing Box, which numerous stories ever since have credited as a Mardas invention.

But in photos of Lennon posing with his Nothing Box, it’s identical to the one in Hammacher’s catalog, down to each rivet. Nothing about Magic Alex’s past or future endeavors (more on that in a moment) would indicate he had the technical knowledge or fabrication skill to even craft a knockoff, let alone invent it himself.

If there’s any doubt about the provenance of Lennon’s Nothing Box, in a February 1966 New York Times story, Dominic Tampone tells the paper that Hammacher Schlemmer sent six Nothing Boxes to the Beatles. In any case, two things seem clear: John Lennon’s Nothing Box came from Hammacher Schlemmer, and he (and others) gave Alex Mardas the credit for it.

That matters because the Nothing Box was Mardas’s entree into the world of the Beatles. Most of the band treated him with casual amusement. “I thought he was just some guy with interesting ideas,” Paul McCartney said. But for Lennon, Magic Alex became a ubiquitous tag-along, from the recording studio to family vacations. In a matter of months, Mardas went from a semi-employed TV repairman to the personal guru of one of the biggest stars in the world,

In 1968, the Beatles launched Apple Corps, their loosely utopian “company”. Magic Alex was hired to head up Apple Electronics despite his proud lack of any technical expertise. “Now I’m doing electronics. Maybe next year, I make films or poems,” he said. “I have no formal training in any of these, but this is irrelevant.” Ideas like color-changing paint or a “robot housewife” sounded reasonable in the chemically-enhanced carnival atmosphere of Apple Corps. Mardas’s repeated and expensive failures to deliver any of his trippy visions were just part of the show.

“From bad to worse”

More serious was Mardas’s complete inability to build even a rudimentary recording studio. His previous unrealized inventions were trifles: who really cared if he couldn’t install an “artificial sun” over the Apple Boutique? But the Beatles were planning their recording career around Mardas’s promise to build a “72-track studio” (when the state of the art was eight tracks) at Apple Corps headquarters. This was serious. Without more hit Beatles records, the whole enterprise would fall apart.

After months of construction and hundreds of thousands of pounds spent, the studio was “the biggest disaster of all time,” in George Harrison’s words. It lacked basics like soundproofing and cable ports between the studio and the booth. The heating and cooling systems roared loudly enough to be captured on tape. The disaster site was only made semi-usable when the band’s longtime producer, George Martin, quickly had some actual recording gear installed.

By now even Lennon was running out of patience for Mardas’s antics. “I brought in Magic Alex and things went from bad to worse,” he would later ruefully admit. When skull-cracking old-school manager Allen Klein took over the Beatles’ affairs, Magic Alex was one of the first to go. Of course, the Beatles themselves would collapse not long after, into a sordid mess of feuds and lawsuits. The financial disaster that was Apple Corps was at the center of this sad coda to the Beatles’ story.

Maybe the Nothing Box did have one practical use: as the calling card for a conman. And while Magic Alex didn’t accomplish anything much, he did contribute mightily to the financial crisis and general chaos that strained the Beatles past the breaking point. Too bad for the rest of us that John Lennon didn’t get his Nothing Box direct from the source.

Alas, we don’t have any more Nothing Boxes in stock. But denizens of the intersection of technology and absurdity might enjoy The Canine Communication Push Buttons. They’re even more absurd if you don’t have a dog.

For more stories about the storied Hammacher Schlemmer, subscribe to Gnomenclature. We’ve got 178 years’ worth. Hope you’ve got some free time.

Who knew that Hammacher Schlemmer one-upped us on worthless purchases you'll likely come to regret decades before our Instant Regret Kits! What's the most pointless thing you ever bought? I bought a hard-cover version of War of the Worlds with fake sponsored product placement worked in throughout the book. I'm not going to read that! But I do kind of like having it still. How about you? Let's hear your pointless purchases in this week's Shoddy Goods chat.

—Dave (and the rest of Meh)

These past Shoddy Goods stories do even less than a Nothing Box, but at least they haven’t broken up any bands that we know of:

• When GE tried to turn your home’s wiring into a sound system

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

• The big league pitcher who invented his own cup, the Nutty Buddy

“It’s like having any room in your house wired for sound - without one extra wire.” That was General Electric’s pitch in the 1965 ad campaign for their new Porta-Fi system. One big console was the source of the records or radio, while a shoebox-sized portable speaker brought the audio to anywhere in the house with an AC outlet.

As American homes got bigger, along with spending on home entertainment, GE bet on Porta-Fi to vault their audio division ahead of competitors like Magnavox, RCA, and Zenith. So why aren’t we all grooving to the Porta-Fi beat today? Because of other trends that GE didn’t predict, which ultimately did more to shape how we listen to music.

Plug in, turn on, buzz off

For almost as long as homes have been wired for electricity, people have been trying to use those wires to carry other kinds of signals. The science for multi-channel power-line telephony was demonstrated in 1910. Dozens of shared power/telephone systems were in operation in the 1920s, especially in Europe, before being overtaken by generally superior separate lines for each. Electrical companies have long talked to technicians through the power lines they’re working on, and used power-line communication for automatic meter reading.

In the home, the first baby monitor sent radio signals through a home’s electrical wiring as long ago as 1937: that’d be the Radio Nurse, which will be familiar to diligent Shoddy Goods readers. The 1950s saw home intercom systems like NuTone become de rigeur in upscale new homes, again using AC lines to transmit sound.

So when GE developed Porta-Fi in the early ‘60s, the technology was tried and tested. A line of Porta-Fi-ready consoles - “The Sutton in contemporary styling, the Jamestown in Early American, and El Camino in continental design” - came with their own transmitter and remote speaker. Plug the transmitter in with the console, plug the portable speaker in somewhere else, and a low-frequency FM signal travels along the power lines from the former to the latter. Simple, indeed: “as easy as plugging in and turning on a lamp”, as one ad put it.

Unfortunately, the further away the speaker was from the console, the worse it sounded. As a 2012 demonstration shows, the cumulative interference on the line produces an increasingly loud buzz as the path gets longer. Just because power lines can carry sound doesn’t mean they’re good at it. They’re just not made to shield the audio signal from everything else.

At one point, midcentury listeners might have been willing to put up with that noise for the convenience and sense of futuristic freedom. By 1965, that point was fast fading into the past.

Bye bye, Miss GE Porta-Fi

At the higher end of home audio, the late ‘60s and early ‘70s saw huge leaps and bounds toward ever-higher fidelity, now considered a Golden Age for hi-fi sound. GE would have loved to attract these free-spending audiophiles, but that buzz would’ve been an immediate buzzkill.

Down at the lower end, portability wasn’t the draw it used to be. Cheap transistor radios took off in 1957 and 1958, no AC outlet required. The first boomboxes were on the horizon, appearing in Europe and Japan in the late 1960s. There wasn’t much novelty left in listening to music in any room of the house - certainly not enough to invest in a massive new GE console.

Speaking of which, stereo consoles themselves were reaching their run-out groove. Newer audio gear was both more compact and higher quality. The aforementioned audiophiles preferred the customizability of component systems, and the stereo’s place as the center of family entertainment was more and more lost to the TV. If Americans were going to devote space to a big, bulky piece of technological furniture, they preferred to be able to watch it.

By the early 1970s, GE had phased out Porta-Fi and its whole line of consoles with it. It didn’t turn out to be the savior of their stereo business, much less the wave of the future. Maybe if they’d had the idea a decade earlier, Porta-Fi might have caught on. Or maybe it just wasn’t quite either “porta” or “fi” enough to have a reason to exist.

In an echo of Porta-Fi’s problems, the idea of using power lines for Internet data would founder decades later on similar issues. In the early days of online infrastructure, broadband over power lines (BPL) seemed to hold some promise. Why bother building out extensive broadband networks when we already have this grid of wires that go to every house?

But it was another case of the wrong tool for the job. Again, all that noise on the line was too much to overcome, and increasing wireless coverage put paid to the idea for good. The various BPL projects were wound down by about 2010, never to be revisited. It was an ending that any Porta-Fi owner could’ve heard coming.

Where are you at on the audiophile spectrum? I bought some reasonably high quality but still fairly small speakers for my TV set-up...in 1999. Still using those! And I basically gave up on all headphones and even most other speakers once I got my Airpods. Do you go all in on sound quality, or are you more about cheap and convenient? Let's hear about your sound set-up and audio gadgets in this week's Shoddy Goods chat.

—Dave (and the rest of Meh)

Enjoy these previous Shoddy Goods stories in any room of the house, without extra wires:

• The first baby monitor was a work of art

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

• A Gap fan’s quest to collect every instore music playlist

A ruddy man in his 50s squats with each foot on a different Gatorade jug. He’s wearing a t-shirt, a helmet, goggles, and white compression shorts - at least, that’s what we can see he’s wearing. From a few feet away, a pitching machine fires a baseball right at his crotch.

“Yeah!” the man shouts, pumping his fists, as off-camera bystanders roar with laughter. “All the way!”

So went one of the hit viral videos of 2008. This wasn’t a clip from Jackass or something posted to a dark-web masochism forum. The man was Mark Littell, former Major League Baseball pitcher, proving the effectiveness of the protective groin cup that he invented. Littell would repeat the trick over and over for any audience that would help him promote the Nutty Buddy. And he’d set a new standard for anyone on the diamond who wanted to protect the family jewels.

Every 10,000 balls

If big league ballclubs voted for “Most Likely to Get Hit in the Crotch By a Baseball on Purpose”, Littell’s teammates probably would have given him the award. Since he emerged from his native southeastern Missouri (also where my mom’s family is from) with the Kansas City Royals in 1973, Littell had been known as a character, talking up a storm in his cotton-fields twang, earning the nicknames “Country” and “Ramrod”. He’d later put all those words into three books of memoirs about his playing days.

Littell was also a lights-out relief pitcher in his prime, a key part of the Royals’ 1976 and 1977 playoff teams. (Well, almost always lights-out; he gave up a home run at the unluckiest possible time to lose the pennant to the Yankees, only the second homer he allowed that season.) After being traded across his home state to my beloved St. Louis Cardinals for equally colorful reliever Al Hrabosky, his 1978 and 1979 seasons were just as good. But persistent bone spurs in his elbow plagued him for the next few years. Littell’s playing career was over when he was only 29.

Years later, while coaching in the minor leagues, Littell started to wonder about one of the occupational hazards of his profession. “I asked my pitchers: How many of you guys don’t wear cups? And half of them raised their hand,” he told the Associated Press in 2007. “So I went off on a little mild tirade at the time… Every 10,000 balls you throw, there will be one that comes right back at you that you can’t avoid.”

The main reasons players didn’t wear cups were that they were uncomfortable, and they didn’t fully protect the equipment anyway. The standard cup, seemingly forever, had been a sort of rounded triangle that didn’t conform to the male human anatomy. It moved around, it pinched, and it just didn’t protect that well: a direct hit could still send you to the injured list.

With some moldable plastic, two golf balls, and $40,000 of his own money, Littell started to design and patent the cup of his dreams, one that would fully protect the area while being as inconspicuous as possible. It featured a little tail that tucked under the area, and was curved in all the right places. “Testicle A, testicle B, they have a place to go,” he explained to ESPN’s Sports Science. “The energy [of being hit], when it disperses, it goes toward the pubic bone.”

Splatter my what now?

Of course, that explanation was followed by Littell taking a fastball to his junk on camera. He didn’t flinch. Littell’s willingness to, as he put it, “literally stand behind my product” was an irresistible attention-getter from the get-go. The crass anything-for-a-laugh vibe of the ‘00s was perfect for his high-speed patter and willingness to be silly, even when that meant risking severe gonad trauma. Astutely gauging the male psyche, he gave the different sizes of the Nutty Buddy flattering names like Hammer, Boss, and Mongo.

“Mark Littell, The Nutty Buddy, Is Completely Nuts“ was how Deadspin put it in the headline for a 2008 story. “For 20 minutes, Mark Littell proceeded to talk and talk and talk, using every testicular euphemism available about his product and its design and how this will save testicles all over the world. He said he personally has taken a few shots to the groin while wearing it this year (two with baseballs, three with paintballs).”

After hinting that he was considering getting shot - yes, shot, with a bullet from a gun - for a future video, Littell expanded on his insight that traditional cups only protected “one and a half testicles” in the most colorful terms: “Sometimes if you get hit on the cup, it still can completely splatter your nut just from the force alone.”

Competitors who doubted his design were challenged to prove their superiority. “Let’s get the CEO of every cup company,” Littell told the AP. “You put your cup on, and I’ll put my cup on, and we’ll see who’s left standing.”

The thing is, for all the laughs, the Nutty Buddy was no joke. The Sports Science staff’s tests showed that a typical ground ball could hit with 2400 pounds of force. A regular cup still delivered 450 pounds of that to the testicles, while the Nutty Buddy reduced that to just 110 pounds. Slow-motion cameras showed the force dispersing in outward ripples from the Nutty Buddy, just as Littell said.

That effectiveness, plus its reputation for comfort, has put the Nutty Buddy at the forefront of a protective renaissance. Cups were all but mandatory when I played high-school baseball in the late ‘80s, but usage had dropped quite a bit since then. The Nutty Buddy has started to turn the tide back. “If you are still playing, the Nutty Buddy cup has completely changed the game,” said one commenter on the r/collegebaseball subreddit. “I hated cups and wouldn’t wear one but I tried this one out and I won’t play infield without one now.”

Mark Littell died in 2022 at the age of 69 due to complications from heart surgery. It was too early, but all those shots to the crotch were not in vain. He’d lived to see his invention widely adopted from the Little Leagues to the Major Leagues. And to the considerable store of goodwill from his playing and coaching days, he added a dose of viral fame from the peak Internet era - and the gratitude of countless ballplayers who’d taken a bad hop to the groin and stayed in the game.

I’ll admit I probably never wore any protective gear, helmet, knee pads, uh…cup, until my twenties. I wasn’t particularly athletic and in those days it would’ve seemed bizarre for any but BMX bikers to put on gear for a ride down the street. I’m not one of those “and we were fine!” types though, I know about survivor bias and I’m all for avoiding scrapes, breaks, and worse. When do you don the protective gear, and when are you skipping it, for yourself or your family? Let’s talk in this week’s Shoddy Goods chat.

—Dave (and the rest of Meh)

These previous Shoddy Goods stories are mostly anatomically correct:

• Why Starting Lineup figures never made the Hall of Fame

• LifeCycle: the first exercise bike as we know it

• The Breakfast Machine: a “50s” appliance from the ‘90s

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