Ron Bless America
What a huckster. What a hustler. Nobody would ever put Ron Popeil in the pantheon of great American innovators. You’d never see Thomas Edison spraying phony hair on his head from an aerosol can. Steve Jobs would never give a product a name ending in “O-Matic”. Henry Ford would never have enlisted an out-of-work Flavor Flav to boast about his product. Ron Popeil didn’t just say “But wait! There’s more!” - he invented it. Everybody knows he’s a cheap shyster.
But everybody’s wrong. In terms of impact, of enthusiasm, of restless inventiveness, Ron Popeil is the real deal. A true American. And we don’t mean that as a backhanded diss of Americans.
He inherited his gift of gab and his need to tinker from his father S.J. Popeil, a New Jersey boardwalk pitchman who invented the Veg-O-Matic and the Chop-O-Matic. And he inherited one crucial piece of wisdom: the way to sell is to demonstrate. When door-to-door salesmen complained that they couldn’t haul around all the vegetables they needed to properly demonstrate the products, Ron turned to TV. And never looked back.
Ever since, he and his Ronco products have spent more time on TV than Lucille Ball and Johnny Carson combined - and remain just as evocative of their era. The Egg Scrambler. Mr. Microphone. The Salad Spinner. No matter how crazy the products, no matter how varied their applications, the ads hewed to a rigidly repetitive formula. Ron Popeil’s commercials didn’t just demonstrate his products. They created a genre.
If they’d just been pure bullshit, no amount of repetition would have kept Ronco afloat. But his products do what they promise to do. They do things no other products can do. They do those things well, and cheaply. Ron isn’t just a hustler, he’s an inventor. OK, so he tackles problems on the order of “how to carry a fishing pole in your pocket” or “how to fit a rotisserie in an apartment kitchen” rather than revolutionizing information delivery or transforming the transportation system. The point is, he’s the kind of guy who’s up late at night, in his kitchen, with six different prototypes, determined to answer the challenge There’s got to be a better way!
Sure, he’s a pitchman. But what good is a revolutionary product that nobody ever buys?
This 5-in-1 Cooking System won’t change your life the way your smartphone did. You probably won’t get as excited as Flavor Flav. But it will deep-fry, it will cook rice, it will steam, it will steam-bake, and it will boil. And it’ll cook a turkey in 45 minutes.
You don’t get to be Ron Popeil, subject of tributes by both Malcolm Gladwell and “Weird” Al Yankovic, without keeping your promises. What a huckster. What a hustler.
