Consuming Interest
Too Full For Foam
By LESLIE ADRIAN THE washing wives of Britain, left with only one illusion, would not like Sydney Smith care to waste it on the Arch- bishop of Canterbury. It would be needed to pro- tect the wash-day fable that clothes will only be- come `deepdown clean' if they are tumbling t'S around uncle? at )east a six-inch head of froth. And most of the detergent makers pander to this illusion by adding superfluous foaming agents to their products.
The September issue of Which? made it quite clear that all those beaded bubbles frothing around the brim of the washing machine (de- greasing the bearings and clogging the pump) are not strictly necessary. In their valuable sur- vey of large washing machines (compulsory reading for anyone considering such a pur- chase), all the tumbler machines were tested with Pat, a new foamless detergent put on the market last April by. J. Bibby and Sons Ltd.
The cleansing action of Pat is similar to that of the more conventional detergents, but it has the advantage that the amount of detergent used can be adjusted according to how dirty the clothes are, and not according simply to the amount of excess foam the machine can absorb. Which? states that four grams of Tide for each gallon of water made enough froth to interfere with the action of the machine; whereas there was no interference with eighteen grams of Pat.
I tried using Pat in a Hoovermatic. Imme- diate result: the dirtier clothes (which benefit most from a stronger solution) cleaner and less mess on the kitchen floor. Future results (I hope): lower bills for maintenance and longer life for the machine. As Pat is the result of collaboration between Bibby and English Elec- tric (for their Liberator), I do not think that I am being unreasonably optimistic.
The washing-machine tie-up explains why Pat is more likely to be found in the electrical de- partment of a big store or Electricity Board showrooms or even, as in Leytonstone, in a radio shop, than in ordinary grocery and hard- ware stores. On a trip around six local shops I got nothing but blank looks and the reiterated re- sponse, 'Foamless detergent? Sorry, I've never heard of it. Why not try Daz (o: Omo, Tide, Surf, etc.), using just a little less?'
Unfortunately Bibby are pretty disillusioned About the intelligence of the British housewife. They believes. that if Pat were easily obtainable (i.e., without the special powder-for-washing- machines approach), it would be tried once, seen not to lather and abandoned for ever. And they are probably right.
Bibby cannot compete with the 'giants' in a national advertising campaign, and even jazzy packets would involve them in expensive new machinery. But there will never be a big de- mand for foamless detergents without publicity.
If you cannot find Pat, write to the Washing Advisory Service, J. Bibby and Sons Ltd., King Edward Street, Liverpool, 3. In London, many big department stores stock it; so do most of the branches of W. H. Cullen. It costs Is. 11d. (14 oz.) and 8s. 3d. (4 lb.)--a genuine 'giant economy' size.
Apropos of washing machines, I have also to hand a furious correspondence between a reader and Thomas Hedley, the makers of Daz. They apparently got in touch with him suggesting he use Daz and offering a free sample to use with his recently acquired washing machine. He was indignant that the people who sold him the machine should have apparently given the deter- gent firm his name and address. I find my heart unable to bleed very profusely for him, not so much because I do not think he is right in prin- ciple (he is) as because one gets inundated with so much in the way of free detergent anonymously that I see little greater irritation in having the sample addressed personally. However in the course of correspondence, he and Hedley's dis- cussed this question of the money spent on adver- tising, free offers, promotions and so on. Hedley's said that the money was saved many times over in increased sales; the inevitably low sales of Pat would confirm that. But there is a piece of sloppy thinking here all the same. if one firm, by adver- tising, puts itself ahead of the competition so that greater sales result, then the advertising does more than pay for itself. If everybody is doing it in a field where the actual demand cannot be indefinitely increased (nobody uses more wash- ing material because of advertising) then this ceases to be so. No one, however, can afford to stop, or the others would grab his sales. So it is in the fields where advertising is most widespread —cereals, soap powders, goods with nothing much but familiarity to choose between one brand and another—that the money spent on advertising does the consumer least good; but it is precisely in those fields that it will continue most profusely to be spent
Two minor but pretty constant irritants are cigarette lighters and, less often, fountain pens. In my experience there is only one lighter that rarely breaks down, and that is the American `Zippo,' which, so far as I know, is not available in this country. (The `Zippo' is advertised as the lighter that no one has ever paid to have repaired. If anything should go wrong—and it's so designed that there is very little that can go wrong—you simply return it to the makers and it is repaired free of charge.) I suspect that some manufacturers of lighters make as much money out of repairing lighters as they do out of sellint, them.
Fountain pens are easily dropped and usually land nib first. There are establishments called pen hospitals which claim to repair any pen, but, if
you happen to own a Parkei pen, your repairs should be no problem. For only the third time in its life of about eight years I took mine to their shop in Bush House, Aldwych, the other day for minor repairs. It took them five minutes to do the job and they made no charge.
The shop has a staff of ten efficient, polite and helpful girls, and there are seven men in the se' vicing department. They will change a nib for you in ten minutes, put on a new pocket clip 111 three to four minutes and do a complete overhaul in half an hour. (In the tunch-hour rush it's little longer.) They will gift-wrap anything Y°LI buy and will change the nib in new pen within a month if you find that it doesn't suit you or the person for whom you bought it. All small jobs like adjusting the flow of ink or straightening a, slightly bent nib are done free of charge. A chetA of one day's jobs showed that free repairs amounted to 40 per cent. of the total.
It would perhaps be unkind to suggest that the)' recoup the money in other ways: some of the charges seem high. A correspondent of mine wrote to them asking . how they justified tile charge of 9s. for the clear plastic barrel of a Pen' and got back a letter that read more like a churel: manual than a business letter In particular treasured the paragraph which read : The components are price fixed in conjunn' tion with higher Authority for distribution. on the Home-market and Export, and for obvious reasons they carry a slightly higher percentage uplift in relation to the complete unit. Maybe they are better at the making of PI than the uses to which pens are_put. But it is sb1 a pretty good repair service.
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