Here in Australia, every other housewife seems to be selling
some product or other in a seemingly pyramid-type sales structure. Make up, underwear, jewellery, candles, food
products, cleaning products, craft supplies, adult toys, weight loss
supplements, wraps that shrink inches off your muffin top, Botox in a bottle;
the list truly is endless and my Facebook newsfeed is constantly bombarded with
calls to action for end of month sales targets or pleas to host a ‘show and go’
(WTH?)
My concerns with this are many fold. Firstly; I honestly don’t have that many
friends to invite round to mine to buy a new cleaning cloth ensemble on a
Wednesday evening. To be brutally
honest, I don’t think I would WANT to be friends with anyone who would choose
to sit round my house on a drafty winters evening fingering a micro fibre cloth
that’s passed around the assembled group.
I don’t care that the products are ‘eco-friendly’. I love bleach. If it doesn’t smell like bleach – how do I
know it’s clean? I’ve been conditioned
like Pavlov’s dog – bleach = clean. Yes,
I was slightly concerned that my one flush of toilet duck contains enough
chemicals to neutralise a metre squared of sea water (or something – I’d
switched off by this point, but the SB was going down a treat), but hey – have you
ever seen a dolphin with barnacles?
No? Exactly! They are literally
squeaky clean thanks to my u-bend addiction (I can almost hear the letter
of appreciation from Sea World landing on my door mat as I type).
And the prices??? Another
reason I try not to attend these occult type evenings is I become overcome with
the notion that my life with be improved by these labour saving devices; how
have I managed to live all my 42 years without a mop bucket that I could also
use to spin my salad (and a free micro fibre cloth to clean up the mess, should
I TOSS my salad – see what I did there?).
How have I coped prior to this point with a mop that ISN’T able to wash
my walls? Who knew? WHO CARED? It becomes an elitist ‘keeping up
with the Jones’. There’s an unwritten
goal to place the biggest order of the night to win the approval of the suburban
saleswoman in the tabard that you normally try not to make eye contact with at
school drop off in the morning. I admit
I have spent $ 150 on a mop ‘system’ (who am I kidding – it was a mop, salad
spinning bucket, a couple of blocks of magic wall erasers and a cleaning
cloth.
When they give things such
billing – I expect a system of small people that crawl out of the bucket to
clean the bastard house for you!) and not that I am in any way, shape or form
bitter, but when I moved out, I left the sodding mop and bucket behind! And don’t get me started on the price of the
cleaning potions. $ 40 for a bottle of
concentrated blah liquid. Do you know
how many toilet ducks on special I could buy for that? Look, I don’t care about the planet. What my generation did to the ozone layer in
the 80s with our synchronised used of hair lacquer isn’t worth knowing and me
deciding to go cold turkey on bleaching my rim isn’t going to save the polar ice
caps.
If I wanted to buy jewellery, I would visit a shop, or
Google the world wide shop window; not wait for a plump housewife in a Holden
to pop round to mine mid-week with a trestle table. I can’t take sex toy advice from a middle
aged woman with three kids that wears slippers on the school run and who double
parks in kiss and drop. It’s just not
right. It opens a Pandora’s box of what goes
on in their bedroom and it’s not something I’d really like to think about when
I’m stood next to her in the playground on weekday afternoons at school pick
up.
I’m genetically engineered to buy something. I can’t attend, share a glass of wine, heckle
the presenter mercilessly and then walk away without purchasing. It seems to correlate also between my level
of piss taking of the presenter to the dollar value of my purchase. I can’t help it. I genuinely don’t mean to take the piss, but
I honestly fail to see how someone can just be so desperately passionate about
a food additive that you sprinkle on your potatoes that turns them from wow L to WOW J There’s a name for
that; it’s called gravy! I am yet to
experience the delights of one of these parties for myself. But, seeing as I am ‘culinarily challenged’
in the kitchen, the best thing I could probably purchase would be an electric
tin opener. I just know I’m going to be judged for not making my own dips, or
rustling up a pavlova whilst I mop my walls, but life’s to bloody short for all
that shit! There are soaps to be watched
(not made!) and wine to be drunk!
My final gripe is the incentives that the guerrilla sales
women seem to benefit from. One woman is
jetting off overseas again tomorrow on the back of her eco-friendly cleaning
product sales. I just don’t get it! I understand she works very hard and has a
plethora of people working under her and has several suburbs ‘cleaned up’ in
the surrounding areas – and I have NEVER heard one individual speak so
passionately about micro fibres BUT I don’t want to know that my overpriced
effing salad spinner bucket is financing her all expenses paid trip to Phuket
(maybe they can only actually travel to places that rhyme with their products). There are glamourous AGMs in upmarket
locations that they live to post photos of.
Hobnobbing with the Regional Managers, who have climbed up the
(impeccably cleaned) ladder to the echelons of a Company financed Rav4; so
covered in Company sign writing that the Police could probably prosecute the
driver travelling behind them on the freeway for reading whilst at the wheel. I don’t feel the need to see photos of you in
eveningwear with your fellow consultants at a Casino on the back of my over-priced
rampant rabbit.
Here’s a novel business model; don’t send the desperate
housewives on jollies where they get drunk and post photos of Barbara from
Canning Vale drunk with her gown stuffed in her support garments trying to snog
the waiter. Just maybe knock $50 off the
price of the sodding mop and bucket and I will use the money to get drunk
myself, tuck my own knickers in my skirt and attempt to snog the sales
assistant in Dan Murphys?
Now, who would like to host a demonstration?
