I recently noted at the local home wares shop a window full of pizza cookers. This appliance looks like a large, round sandwich griller. I can't imagine why anyone would prefer to own a specialized appliance just to cook pizza rather than use their oven. Everyone already has an oven. Pizza cookers require storage space and are probably harder to clean than the pan you use in the oven.
Each year I note a new appliance like this on the market, something that is essentially the same as an existing, and possibly even useful appliance (I do find the sandwich griller very useful), but in a different shape or size. They are supposed to allow you to prepare something that you already prepare some other way. They quickly end up gathering dust in the most inaccessible cupboard available.
Why don't the home wares companies ever come up with something truly innovative. I'm waiting for someone to develop a compact, energy and space efficient system to wash and dry Ziploc bags. That's something I'd pay $100 for.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Anyone wondering why there is a pizza cooker, or automated potato peeler, or -- the Ipod or a Game Boy -- has not read "Selling the Wheel". The biggest lesson of this, my favorite book on persuasion (A/K/A selling), is to create a need where none existed before, or convert a need from some current solution to your (profitable?) solution. Therefore our society has been inundated with gadgetry.
ReplyDeleteThink of "good" gadgetry. We now sit in the future and cheer the innovations of our ancestors -- from carving stone tablets to papyrus to hand-written script to typed letters to word processed documents to e-mail. “Selling the Wheel”, taken to its conclusion, predicts the next step: eliminate writing entirely -- invent a telephone chip with near infinite memory, to record all incoming/outgoing conversation -- built into your ear.
Now there is no more need to write.
Is this good gadgetry, or bad gadgetry, or just a terrifying prospect? What would a Victorian feel about e-mail (or airplanes)? What about those who take pleasure in reading? or writing? Perhaps those people also take pleasure in simplifying their lives without washing and storing pizza cookers. But this world has plenty of room for people who feel they really need a pizza cooker, that the pizza cooker will make them a happier person.
The pizza cooker represents progress. We’ve gone beyond open fire cooking, or burying clay pots in hot ashes, passed through stoves and ovens and microwaves (which started as only a way to boil water and cook popcorn), and now we’ve reached the penultimate -- the pizza cooker. But our grand children will laugh at our primitive pizza cooker. They will have the Ultimate -- a pill that creates the taste, smell, food energy and sensory satisfaction of eating a pizza.
No more need to eat. Wow, and we had really believed we were happy, complete, sophisticated, efficient, with just a pizza cooker.