Never Needs Sharpening

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So you've invented a new product that does exactly what it's intended to do, but it has only one teeny tiny infinitesimal flaw: it doesn't do the one thing everyone expects it will. Or it can't be used in the one way everyone will assume it's meant to be used. So what do you do? You turn that frown upside down and spin that flaw into an asset!

Those thin, brittle serrated knives that can't be sharpened suddenly "never need sharpening". Those silicone oven mitts that fall apart in the washing machine "clean up with plain water - no detergent needed!" And so on. Allows the advertiser to show people Too Incompetent to Operate a Blanket attempting to sharpen knives, etc. and failing miserably.

Compare Our Product Sucks, where product flaws are described more honestly and Good Bad Bugs which is (generally) a software and gaming trope when a bug makes its way into the game, isn't picked up or fixed by the developers, but eventually becomes useful for some reason.

Examples of Never Needs Sharpening include:

Advertising

Advertising in general - specific cases are listed under "Real Life"

• Of course, estate agents have been doing this for years. No, that house isn't small, it's... cozy! That one isn't over a kebab shop on a main road with 24/7 traffic, it's "moments away from local amenities"! Basement suite? No, it's "bright"!

Marge Simpson: It's dilapidated! Lionel Hutz: "Rustic." Marge Simpson: But that one's on fire! Lionel Hutz: ...Motivated seller!

• • Similarly, on Will and Grace, Grace was translating an apartment want ad: "Cozy" means "Tiny," "Chelsea-adjacent" meant "New Jersey," and "Regularly maintained" meant "The Super hoses blood off the sidewalk every morning."
  • This troper read a book (I can't remember exactly which one) that had a section on tricks advertisers used. A "cozy" apartment was one where you could cook a meal, open the door and watch TV - all without getting up from the toilet.
    • Freakonomics also had a section comparing real positive features about houses and negative features described positively. In particular, if a house is described as being in a nice neighborhood it means that nearby houses are not as bad as it.

Live-Action TV

• Played with in Monty Python's string sketch, in which the product is string, precut into 3-inch-long segments: ""THE NOW STRING! READY CUT, EASY TO HANDLE, SIMPSON'S INDIVIDUAL EMPEROR STRINGETTES - JUST THE RIGHT LENGTH!"

Music

• This is one of the common advertising claims that goes into the lyrics of "Step Right Up" by Tom Waits.

Newspaper Comics

• Frank and Ernest occasionally has fun with this in Sunday strips, with Frank looking over an advertisement Ernie has written, pointing out issues or missed points regarding his advertised item along the way, and Ernie promptly explaining how his advertisement has spun these issues into alleged positives. For instance, a run-down theater whose roof is missing is referred to as "the place to see the stars" (because you can see stars through the open roof at night...).
• Dilbert lampshaded this by Dogbert borrowing the Selsun Blue catchphrase of "It tingles, so I know it's working" with his beer ad of "My head hurts, so I know it's working."
• In-universe example: There's a What's New with Phil and Dixie comic-strip, with a full-page panel set in the dealer's room of a tabletop gaming convention. One of the booth staff is dismayed to discover that a box of gaming miniatures was left in a hot place and have partially melted; his co-worker says it's no problem, and puts out a sign advertising leper figures.

Web Original

• Snopes has a page about an urban legend about white salmon having a tough time competing in the marketplace against the more desirable pink salmon until one clever company started advertising its white salmon with the tagline "Guaranteed not to turn pink in the can". Not to be outdone, a just-as-clever pink salmon company started advertising with the tagline "No bleach added in processing."
• One The Truth ad did a mockumercial for a pimple removed.

"Guys, this burns." "That's how you know it's working." "No, I mean, it really burns" as the girl catches on fire.

• • Manufacturers add tingling agents to acne and dandruff medications mainly because consumers expect these products to tingle. Unfortunately, tingling is a sign that the product is irritating the skin and, in the process, making the underlying condition much worse. Menthol is by far the most common culprit.

Real Life

• The granddaddy of all Never Needs Sharpening products was the Ginsu Knife, which was advertised as "never needs sharpening". The implication was that they never went dull, which was only technically true. Most Ginsus broke or rusted long before they dulled. Of course, if a Ginsu did last long enough to go dull (about a year) there wasn't much you could do, since Ginsus were thin, brittle, and so heavily serrated that they actually couldn't be sharpened.
• Miracle Blade uses the same phrase for the same reason. They also spin the thinness of the blade in an attempt to muddle the concepts of sharpness and thinness in viewers' minds. Chef Tony can slice food more thinly than you can because he's more experienced and practiced doing that for the routine, not because his knife is thinner than yours. Thin blades wear out more quickly and can even snap during use, sending shards of sharp metal flying around the place and possibly into your food (if not worse places).
  • Thinness and sharpness actually are linked... but only for the actual cutting edge—one reason obsidian has long been a favored material for cutting implements is because it's relatively easy to make incredibly thin, sharp edges on it, and this is also the principle behind the common science-fiction concept of monomolecular blades. As mentioned above, the downside is that it's difficult for such a thin edge to actually remain sharp for long... and also as mentioned above, making the rest of the blade thin has entirely negative effects.
• The Ove-Glove is mainly marketed using the Too Incompetent to Operate a Blanket method, but they also claim that the glove "doesn't need washing - just rinse and go"! One review of the Ove-Glove on YouTube points out that if you get the glove dirty enough that it needs to be washed, there's not much you can do - water alone won't remove any grease stains, and the glove falls apart in the washing machine.
• My Lil Reminder, a small voice recorder, says it's "inobtrusive" and "won't bother the people sitting around you" - likely because the volume on the product is so low that you probably won't hear it either.
• The Pasta Pro, a big pasta pot with a lid that doubles as a colander, proudly advertises that the lid locks on tight so you won't scald yourself when the lid falls off. Some reviewers have reported that the lid sticks so badly that it won't come off when the pot is hot.
• Dyson vacuum cleaners. The last^[when?] infomercial contained a testimonial from a young man who looked to be about thirty years old, stating that "every Dyson he'd ever owned" worked great. He was on his fifth Dyson and he loved it. Sounds like a great testimonial, but think about it for a moment: a thirty-year-old man who has owned five vacuums must be replacing his vacuum every two years. This is not a mobile phone or a laptop that needs to be upgraded regularly, it's a vacuum. All it does is suck up dirt. There is no reason to buy a new one unless the old one breaks down and can't be repaired. A vacuum costing what a Dyson does should last between twenty and thirty years. So why is this guy on his fifth vacuum?
• Any kitchen implement that "cleans up in a snap - a quick rinse and you're ready to go!" is probably not dishwasher-safe. If it was, they'd say "just stick it in the dishwasher and you're ready to go!"
• Eggies were designed to eliminate the difficult and time-consuming task of peeling hard-boiled eggs. It's true that pouring raw eggs into individual plastic molds and boiling those does eliminate peeling, but oiling and assembling each Eggie by hand (each is made up of four fiddly little pieces), getting the raw eggs through the small holes on the top of the Eggies, and cleaning them afterwards takes twice the time that peeling the eggs would have. Reviewers also found that the Eggies aren't really nonstick (you have to wipe each individual piece with an oil-soaked paper towel before assembling them), plus they leak egg white into the water, meaning the user has to scrub out the pot.
• A recent^[when?] commercial for a brand of tea touts the health benefits of drinking more water, then lets its viewers know that women who drink their tea get more water than those who drink the leading brand. How one brand of tea can contain more water than another is left as an exercise to the reader.
  • I bet those other brands use dried leaves. Scandal.
• Commercials for the PSP Go touted "download-only" as a selling point. What this means is that the PSP Go lacks a UMD drive: if you "upgrade" to a Go, then your entire existing library is useless apart from whatever games you've already bought for download. In addition, the vast majority of PSP games are unavailable on PSN, with Square-Enix's entire library (with the exception of Dissidia) conspicuously absent, and judging from the PSN's notoriously unreliable update schedule, it's unlikely that the Go will ever have access to more than a tiny fraction of the PSP library.
  • Even better, the Go uses a different type of memory card and headphone jack than its cousin so you'll have to buy new ones, and the Go's different dimensions means it won't fit in carrying cases designed for the regular PSP.
• Natural fiber yarns are dyed in "lots". Knitters have to be careful that all the yarn they buy for a specific project is from the same dye lot or there could be a noticeable difference in colour after washing. Manufacturers of cheap scratchy acrylic yarn are now advertising that their product is superior because it has no inconvenient dye lots. That's because acrylic isn't dyed per se: the manufacturers simply add the dye to the petrochemical goo they make the yarn from.
  • In some cases, no-dye-lot yarn is still dyed in lots: the manufacturer just doesn't bother to keep track of them. Hope you like your blue sweater with one green sleeve.
• The advertising for Mystery Science Theater 3000-riffed Beginning of the End proclaimed loudly how "No stop motion animation was used to create the giant grasshopper effects!"... when zooming in on regular-sized grasshoppers climbing over photographs works about as well as you might expect.
• In the world of software, you might hear the phrase "It's not a bug, it's a feature!" or "unintended feature"
  • Though occasionally there are actual features which some people misinterpret as bugs. For instance, a clunky interface may be organized better in an update, which is good for most people but bad for the old-school types that already memorized the clunky version. The latter group may complain of a "bug" that changed the interface.
• Those commercials for Goldline that you see Fox News and Glenn Beck advertising insist that, since the entire world will soon be descending into poverty-driven madness, that you should trade in all of your soon-to-be-worthless cash for their delicious, shiny gold. They don't bother mentioning that since they're taking in all the paper money, that they're driving themselves into the future, gold-driven poorhouse. They casually forget to mention that the value of paper money and precious metals tends to go up and down, with paper money going down right now and precious metals going up right now, so they're hoping that people dumb enough to assume that this trend will continue on into eternity will buy the gold and then wait for the trend to reverse, making themselves rich and the buyer looking like a moron distracted by shiny objects.
  • That's not how they're making money. They're making money by pretending to be gold brokers, trading cash for gold near the current rate, but they're really selling gold at a huge markup. There's been some Senate inquiries into this. While the price of gold probably is going to go down and isn't that great an investment, if you wish to buy gold anyway, check the current price of gold online so when you go to buy it, you aren't suckered by someone offering it to you at three times what the market says it's worth.
  • One has to wonder if they have a partnership with the exact opposite companies like "Cash 4 Gold" who are urging you to send in your unwanted gold, silver, platinum, or whatever jewelry and get cash in return...with, of course, the company you're sending your jewelry to deciding on exactly how MUCH cash you get in return. Actually quite hilarious on the occasions when commercials for these two types of companies air sequentially.
• The Orengina drink had an unfortunate habit of separating out into two unappealing looking layers. Hence its advertising slogan "Shake the bottle, wake the drink"
• The Original Mattress Factory used to run ads accusing other mattress companies of doing this by advertising mattresses that "never needed turning" because they only worked in one orientation.
• Atlantic City casinos are advertised as 'the place where the most winning is done'. The odd wording intentionally masks that despite how much 'winning' is done, there isn't a margin of profit from the wins.
• Bowflex does this. Unlike an actual lifting weight, the resistance is not linear throughout the range of motion, which various people pointed out and slammed them over. So they started advertising it as featuring "progressive resistance".
• After the Internet and news media exploded over a bad case of Did Not Do the Research on FOX's quiz show Million Dollar Money Drop, FOX promoted the show saying "the airwaves and Internet were on fire" and that it was "the most talked-about show of the season." They intentionally neglected to point out that most of that talk was either "How did your writers come up with the wrong answer to a question when it takes 60 seconds to look up the answer online?" or "Why are you stalling with 5 minutes of Padding to drag out The Reveal to a question when it takes 60 seconds to look up the answer online?"
• The characteristic vibration of a Harley-Davidson engine. Harley claims that it's due to the power of the engine, and specifically calls for you to "feel the power" in their advertising. In reality, it's due to the fact that any v-twin with a v-angle less than 90° will vibrate a lot, with the effect increasing the narrower the angle.
• Numerous el-cheapo consumer products (designed to sell to non-technical people who don't understand them enough to know better) are engineered to be superficially good value (by maximizing various saleable ‘magic numbers’ at the lowest achievable manufacturing cost and a low-ish price, without regard for if they usefully deliver on them in any meaningful way beyond evading the bare-minimal laws), but on the inside they're still throwaway junk.
  Here are some examples of such (from the relatively tame and benign, to the nastiest and most cynical):
  • Department-store PCs typically include an unnecessarily fast (or high-clocked anyway) CPU relative to the other parts; a hard-disk drive with large capacity but low performance; and gigabytes of pre-installed bloatware (spun as “features”, and often shoddily-coded to boot) to add assault to insult.
    Basically, if it's not slow enough that the average buyer (who doesn't realize how much work a properly-configured computer is capable of doing) publicly complains or returns the PC, then it's good enough for the consumer retail brands.
    Their internal components are selected as necessary to outlast the (generally 1-year) warranty with few enough returns (to satisfy the brand's accountants), but not a cent extra spent to extend their lifespan past that (anything longer you get from those machines shall be taken as a fortunate bonus); and even where a component itself is decent, the manufacturer may provide as little care as they can get away with (e.g. running HDDs barely within their temperature rating). 'Business-class' notebooks (e.g. Dell Latitude, IBM/Lenovo Thinkpad, Toshiba Tecra) and quality custom-built desktops may cost a little more for their basic specifications (compared to their consumer-junk counterparts), but at least they can handle serious work while lasting a reasonable time (and not malfunctioning too often).
    As for Apple, they come at a hefty premium with a user-friendly (for n00bs anyway) operating system and “luxurious” external appearances; but the hardware on their consumer-oriented models isn't much above par (they used Seagate's U Series 6 HDDs which were the world's slowest by quite a margin, even back when they were made during 2001 and 2002; Seagate's 7200RPM Barracuda ATA IV at the same time was much faster, quieter and more durable for just a few dollars more), and even their “professional” devices suffer from more than their fair share of engineering problems. “Think Different” indeed.
  • Typical modern home fans (apart from Vornado's) are available in large diameters, but feature shallow blades (moving miserly amounts of air, just enough to satisfy the average buyer) to minimize the size of motor required.
    Most of the “posh” metal models are actually worse in this regard than inexpensive plastic, since their cruder blade shape (constrained by manufacturing methods) leads to inferior aerodynamics.
    It is noteworthy that fan heaters generally contain reasonably deep blades even at the budget end, since they need to actually move a decent volume simply to avoid overheating (with >1kW of heating at full power, up to 3kW depending on the outlet rating regionally).
  • Some off-brand kettles have a stainless-steel (“premium”) casing, but with such poor electrical components that you're doing well enough to make it through their (pitiful) warranty length anyway.
    You'd be better-off just getting a plain polypropylene-bodied kettle from a reputable manufacturer (which should at least have decent internal components, good for at least a few years reliably), if your budget won't accommodate one of their stainless-steel models.
  • Consumer digital cameras often use(d) a sensor with a large array of (mega)pixels, but with high element noise (especially crippling under low-light conditions) and without the quality optics necessary to make the resolution useful in the first place. To say nothing even of technique (which is the easily the most vital prerequisite to getting a good photograph)…
  • A while ago, some Chinesium manufacturer figured out they could penny-pinch on finned column heaters by filling them with an aqueous solution instead of proper silicone oil. The only problem? Aqueous fluid can't operate at the same temperatures. However, increasing the number of fins (to lower the surface temperature for the same power) would use a lot more steel, thereby wiping out the “savings” several times over. So the kludge they settled on was to keep the same-powered heating elements and same number of fins, just have lower trip temperatures on the thermal cut-outs (to stay under the aqueous solution's limit) such that they can't stay on continuously at full power the way quality heaters can. Inevitably they quickly spun this as “saving energy”; and they get away with it because their usual buyers mostly purchase over-sized heaters for the room they're in anyway. As a “bonus” they point out that aqueous solution is easier to dispose of (never mind that those junkers won't last anywhere near as long as a good heater in the first place).
  • Typical modern residential vacuum cleaners use horribly inefficient motors (outputting much more heat than motion), to pander to the popular power-fetishism (electricity input anyway) while keeping the price and size down. Basically, any efficiency where the motor doesn't literally catch fire is “fine”; for comparison a typical fan heater's motor uses well under 1% of the total power (for a reasonably safe airflow temperature), so make of that what you will.
    The rest of the design is arranged (to be cheap) without consideration for serviceability or even maintainability, either (as you can see in DiodeGoneWild's teardown of one).
  • The cruellest case by far is consumer-grade “surge protection”; for reasons explained by Zero Surge, it can actually cause irrepairable equipment damage (to delicate, expensive logic circuitry) where (without the “protection”) nothing would have otherwise been even slightly harmed. While not all such units divert surges to earth/ground (just the “good” ones), given how disastrous the consequences are you're best off treating them on a guilty-unless-proven-innocent basis. Even marketing the units themselves as “inexpensive” is deceptive given that their core MOVs cost less than one dollar (and an MOV is indeed included across the input of many decent PSUs anyway); and their impressive-figured (in the tens-or-hundreds of thousands of dollars) “connected equipment warranties” are deliberately arranged to exclude coverage of serious damage (indeed the whole reason their sellers can keep the number of claims as low as it is, is precisely because they're marketed to consumers who seldom actually require protection beyond what's built-into decent equipment).
    • In home environments, it also helps that the majority of household gadgets (apart from PCs themselves) tend to be of Class II (double-insulated) construction, so have no direct earth reference thereby freeing them from damage (although there's still no good to diverting surges to protective earth). It's in office (and other professional) environments with numerous interconnected Class I (earthed) devices, that the real destruction occurs.
      It might also be the case, that North American-engineered electronics may better survive such torture (since it's them who had to suffer through those abominations in commercial environments in the first place, before Zero Surge changed the game)…which is genuinely an impressive feat if true (far more impressive than properly protecting the PSU itself in the first place!).