That´s...bananas!

Just when I thought I´d seen it all....
but what I saw in a shop yesterday about topped it all...
The common banana, in its usual state, is in my experience a soft, easily edible food item. It comes with its own biodegradable wrapper.You can bite into it, cut it, or squash it with a fork. No special tools are required to enjoy one.
Or so I believed. Until I set eyes on...the Banana Cutter.
Yup, you heard me right. The thing looks like a pair of scissors with seven sets of blades, and it promises to deliver six perfectly spaced slices of banana with one cut. The price for this special tool? Twice what they demanded for a set of four kitchen knives that sat right next to it on the shelf.
So they expected patrons to buy something that
-had absolutely no practical value,
-could do only one job, and that probably not even well,
-would need a complicated cleanup after use,
-and was, as a unitasker, ridiculously overpriced when compared to the simple-to-clean, more versatile, and absolutely-sufficient-for-the-job-of-turning-bananas-into-slices humble knife next to it.

What struck me was that there were already some empty spaces on that shelf.

There really were people who were ready to spend their money on something like that. Enough money to pay for a full meal in a restaurant, and more than the average worker hereabouts earns in a full hour of work. Which means that whoever buys one of these is ready and willing to sacrifice more than a full hour of their life for the sake of acquiring such a useless piece of clutter.

I just doubt that they make that realization.
Calculating how long you need to work for the price of something you want to buy, a la "Your money or your life", is something that doesn´t come naturally. But when you look at it this way, it sometimes gets easier to avoid things that are destined to be clutter form the start.


Julia