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The biggest trick the devil ever pulled was to convince the public that they should be buying liquid soap dispensers. I am deadly serious. At some point in living memory someone looked at a bar of soap and thought, “We’re not making enough money off of this, what can we do to convince people to spend more?” And they came up with the idea of putting liquid soap in a plastic dispenser and selling that for five times the price of a bar of soap.
Sure, I know you’re saying, but bars of soap could get all mushy and dirty and disgusting and dispenser soap is always clean. But you’ve just been sucked in by the soap Satans. That’s what they want you to think. It doesn’t really matter if soap is grubby anyway because it’s soap. It will clean off its own germs, but even if a bar of soap gets a bit manky towards the end it is still cheaper and less wasteful to just buy another bar of soap. Soap essentially costs nothing. But you’ve been fooled into paying lots for it. And you’ve walked into this trap willingly.
But Rich, the liquid soap is convenient, due to its liquid nature. It’s really easy to make a bar of soap liquidy enough to use. You just put some water on it. You’ve been conned.
Liquid soap makes sense in some environments, like a public bathroom or a hotel. But that’s partly our own squeamishness, there’s not really any issue about using the same soap as a stranger. But we have that squeamishness so a one off dispenser situation saves soap and money. But in your own house? No, people. We are being fooled.
I stay in lots of hotels and it bothers me sometimes that they give you a whole bar of soup (even a smallish one) for your one night stay, when you’re only going to use it five times (and only then if you’re one of those weird people who washes their hands after a wee). Some hotel soap is so cheap and nasty as to be little more than a bar of unusable plastic, but sometimes it’s a nice bar of soap and I’ve taken to bringing those bars home with me to use again. And I have to tell you even these tiny bars of soap last for fucking ever. We have liquid soap too (which my wife uses) and we’ve had to replace those three or four times, whilst the small bars of soap seem to never die. And I am one of those weird people wo washes their hands after a wee (and after a poo obviously, that goes without saying) and I also wash my hands after dealing with the cats’ litter trays and feeding the cats and doing the washing up. Those bars of soap get used multiple times a day and last literally forever. Instead of liquid soap you might as well liquidise five pound notes and use those to wash your hands. That’s literally what you are doing.
Usually I am not a Luddite about stuff like this and prefer progress over all. I am not being like a Nigel Farage saying we have to only use the unperfumed soap and greaseproof toilet paper of the 1950s or like Stewart Lee saying the uncommercialised soap of the 1980s was more rigorous and better. I am not being one of these people who claim that old Cadbury Creme Eggs are better than the new ones, even though I've never tasted a new one and just believe things should never change and can never be improved - imagine if everything worked that way and people refused to even try anything new because they were sure the thing they had already was perfect. Usually progress and moving forwards are good, or at least an attempt is made and we quickly realise why it is not as good as what we had before. But we've just sleep-walked into accepting liquid soap as being better and no one has drawn a line in the sand and said "no more". But I am that man. Although I will continue to buy liquid soap as my wife prefers it.
Even though a bar of soap was good enough for past generations, now increasingly it is being replaced by this wasteful and unnecessary and costly newfangled liquid soup.
Admittedly a few years ago the soap people tried to really take the piss by introducing an automatic liquid soap dispenser (I wrote about it at the time, but can’t find the blog -it’s not like I am obsessed with soap) so you didn’t get the dirt of another person’s hand on your hand as you pressed the button to get the soap (which was the same as saying “Our soap doesn’t work, so you mustn’t touch anything with germs on it before you use it”). We knew that was stupid. So why haven’t we seen through the whole liquid soap con?
Join my campaign to get back to regular soap.You’re being taken for a ride by soap billionaires. A bar of soap is fine. And if you take them from hotels they’re essentially free. But it’s not that I am a tight-arsed Scrooge trying to save money. I just care about the waste of soap.
The eBay auctions have done better than expected at raising money for future internet projects. I will continue to add stuff. Today I put up a few obscure but nice items (some of which I would guess are unique) that any obsessive Lee and/or Herring fan should love. The Lee and Herring tour programme is especially good, I think. There’s 24 pages of content, including a cartoon of the different teachers that I don’t think appeared in any other format (may be wrong) and loads of photos and comedy content. As always we put way more effort than was necessary into things like this. But the 7 Raymonds stuff is much rarer and the pink card is signed by me in 1987 when I used to use a cartoon fish in place of my surname. Anyway,
all the items are here and keep an eye on that page as I will be adding new stuff all the time. I’ve just added a signed post card of Radio Cambridgeshire DJ Christopher South!
