You're a fan of the free market. Over the course of a year, it brings you food you've never experienced, drinks you've never tasted and inevitably an invention or two to streamline your life. But occasionally, it throws up a wounded duck. Here to shoot it down, we bring you some products that might just miss the sweet spot of demand—by a mile.
Oversharing has become a national epidemic. But until this year, your spending habits and your digital boasting were separate games. No longer. Exhibit A: Blippy.com, which posts your credit card purchases to the web for all your friends to see. Better pay cash for that John Denver anthology.
For $1000, you should expect a lot. Like usefulness. Well, 85 tools, a laser pointer, cigar cutter and saw later, and you have a 4.7 pound paperweight. The unwieldy beast is almost impossible to handle, much less fit in your pocket. It's more MacGruber than MacGyver.
And now, coming to you from the "If It Ain't Broke, Don't Fix It" file: the pouch on your boxer briefs. Thanks to these Canadian skivvies' "breathable side panels" (it's all about the airflow) we get the male equivalent of, ahem, "lift and separate." It's already too much information.
You drink it for the creative inspiration (it worked so well for van Gogh), the visions, the experience…but you're not tippling absinthe for the taste. And yet, here's 27 yards of wormwood-tinged dental hygiene, which we might add lacks any of absinthe's famed "properties." But in a pinch, you could always wrap it around a sugar cube and drop it in your whiskey.
For a smooth $20,000, you can be the proud owner of a creepy, would-be Disney villain living in your bedroom mirror. This disembodied, animated head integrates into your home security system and alerts you—in a lilted British cadence, of course—to the doorbell, gates left ajar and the like. Evil laugh not included.
