Yes, it’s true. No, no, I can admit that. There’s no reason to feel sorry for us. Electric shavers ARE in fact, boring to talk about, much less blog about, and tedious to buy, use, repair and get replacement parts for. Why am I knocking my industry, you ask? It’s for the sole reason that these waters have become muddied, ladies and gentlemen. Muddied and dirty, and thinned out like a fine sheen now reflecting little rainbow reflections in the gulf of mexico.
The problem that has arisen is that at some point over the last ten years, a few non-shaver sellers out there (not mentioning names but the biggest one of them is named after a famous rainforest) decided that selling electric shavers to the great unwashed is an easy and profitable thing to do. The various “marts” also took notice of this and gave a rousing “yeah, we’ll do that too” to then be quickly followed by every little pissing electronics store who clunked a website together.
So what you now end up with is 4,575,862 different places to buy electric shavers. And of those 4,575,862 places, about three of them know enough ABOUT electric shavers to make even the most rudimentary recommendation to a buyer as to what will work best for them or who can tell said buyer which parts they need to keep it running (you guessed it, Shavers.com is one of them). Try going down to your favorite neighborhood “mart” and ask them which parts will fit the Braun series 2000 shaver. Chances are that you will be answered by some pimple-faced kid with a lot of “umms”, a glazed look and a thin trickle of drool down the chin. Mayhaps I even say that once said pimply kid recommended that the customer call Shavers.com for the answer, and then come back to the mart so that they could reap the rewards of the purchase. Shame on you, mart. Shame.
Now what is worse is the fact that the shaver manufacturers do not want to deal with 4,575,862 resellers of shavers who know nothing about their products other than the sku numbers (4,575,859 if you count out the three that do know something) so they made the decision to stop caring about resellers other than the marts. This is the main reason that really high-quality electric shavers are no longer trickling out of factories any longer. What you are left to choose from are generic, “techy” looking, plastic pieces of crap that do an okay kind of job, but rarely more than that. There ARE a few exceptions to that statement (to be fair) but the marts sure couldn’t tell you which ones are the exceptions.
The fact that 90% of what’s out there is crap, there are waaay too many companies selling them, not many know enough about them, and the fact that the average consumer grows more steadily frustrated with the many options and lack of knowledge regarding the product, I often wonder just what it will take the bring a once proud and innovative industry back from the brink. Maybe we can do it at Shavers.com, maybe not. But until someone does, electric shavers will continue to remain thoroughly dreary shadows of their former selves.
In other words, thoroughly boring.