Decadence
I have been getting the Hammacher Schlemmer catalog for years. The merchant has been around for 175 years, which is, in itself, impressive and means that it’s origins in the Bowery area of New York City in 1848 as a hardware store set its beginnings in the pre-Civil War era. That means it was just in its early years during the era of the Dead Rabbits Gang and Boss Tweed with his Tammany Hall crowd (Think The Gangs of New York with Daniel Day Lewis and Leonardo DiCaprio). The store went through its full array of corporate reorganizations with members of the Hammacher and Schlemmer families coming in and going out. What tended to distinguish the store more than anything else was its innovation. It prides itself on all sorts of first-ever things. It was the first store to have a telephone and to sign up for the yellow pages directory. It was one of the first stores to mint its own “copperhead” coins during the metal shortages of the Civil War. And it boasts an impressive array of innovative products that started via its catalogue. There was the pop-up toaster, the electric toothbrush and the telephone answering machine to name a few. Who doesn’t remember when Harry was meeting Sally and Harry used the karaoke machine at Hammacher Schlemmer to sing The Surrey with the Fringe on Top from Oklahoma?
By 1907, Hammacher Schlemmer was busy building out its hardware line and was still 25 years away from launching the electric iron and electric broom. Meanwhile, in the early oil-boom days of Dallas, Texas, Neiman Marcus was born as a purveyor of luxury goods for the discerning nouveau riche housewife. Hammacher Schlemmer was building out its gadget reputation while Neiman Marcus was creating its “Needless Markup” image by offering fancier and fancier duds and baubles. Then, in the late 1950’s, the little gadget company was sold from the families that had controlled it for over a century into a corporate conglomerate that decided to ramp up that gadgetry into something over the top. They started selling things like in-home bowling alleys (turning an all-American pastime into a symbol of personal excess). Remember the scene from the end of There Will Be Blood? Daniel Day Lewis is an entirely different kind of gang lord. He is an Uber-wealthy oil man who has ruthlessly accumulated massive wealth and that gets epitomized in his Los Angeles mansion with none other than an in-home bowling alley. It is there that Daniel Day Lewis tells his acolyte about how he can drink his milkshake whenever the hell he pleases because, to him, wealth gives him that privilege. Wow, how’s that for integrating thoughts? Merchandizing, Catalogue sales (an Americana mainstay….think Montgomery Wards), family business, corporatization, violent gangs and commercial gangs, New York City versus Dallas, oil and innovation. It’s the American story of unbridled excess leading from one new invention to another and trying like hell to keep up with the Joneses going from no-door to two-door to four-door to station wagon to SUV to Cybertruck. It all makes my head spin.
I no longer get the Hammacher Schlemmer catalogue in the mail, or if I do I toss it out. But I am on the Hammacher Schlemmer email catalogue mailing list. What would a merchandising innovator be if it wasn’t digitizing its offering…probably even past email into Facebook, Twitter/X, Instagram and TikTok (I ignore social media marketing like I ignore direct mail marketing). My personal sweet spot is email, most likely because that’s where and when I seem to have come of commercial age. So I do tend to look at the Hammacher Schlemmer digital catalogue offered up to me via email. I have noticed for several years that they, like the Neiman Marcus Christmas catalogue, like to put something really eye-catching on the cover. It’s usually something you haven’t seen before are more intrigued by other than likely to buy. The obvious merchandising tactic is just to grab you and get you to open the catalogue on the decent chance that you will see and find something that you are willing to overpay for. The things I remember noticing from long ago were things like miniature riding cars for the kids of rich folks. What kid doesn’t want to have a riding car that looks like a miniature of Dad’s car? For that matter, what Dad doesn’t hanker for that same toy to give his children so that he can vicariously enjoy its thrills while patting himself on the back for having “made it.” Of course, ride-on electric kids cars have long since become mainstream Toys R’Us toys for a few hundred dollars. My granddaughters had their’s years ago and have long since outgrown it.
I guess I haven’t been paying attention because I can’t easily remember what other cover extravagant toys have been on recent covers from either Hammacher Schlemmer or Neiman Marcus for several years. And then, today, I opened my email and was stopped dead. In what is being billed as their 175 Year Anniversary edition (of sorts), on the cover was a 16 foot boat. Boats have long been the place of symbolic excess in human consumption. People who want to impress people buy yachts. The idea of being able to live a life of luxury bobbing around in a sea or lake in quarters that strive to be as luxurious as your land-based home but always fall inevitably short of that…because they are on a goddamn boat…seems to appeal to people. Maybe they like the smell of fresh sea air, but I tend to smell brine and fish and diesel fuel. There is a reason they say the second best day of life is the day you buy a boat because the best day is the day you sell that boat.
Well this Hammacher Schlemmer cover boat is something else altogether. First of all, like all things modern and with-it these days, it is electric (but not really). It has an electric motor for propulsion at a maximum of 5 mph (don’t they measure nautical speed in knots?). So, we know it isn’t a speedboat. What it is is a hot tub boat. That’s right, it has occupying the dominant part of its length and 8’x4’x2’ deep hot tub in it that gets heated up to 104 degrees by a diesel engine (hence…not so very electric). It looks in the pictures to be able to take 6 passengers, but by my math, that will make for more flesh than water in that tub if you get all 6 into it at once. There are imbedded ice chests in the teak deck that pop up alongside other pop-up speakers (probably Bluetooth linked to your iPhone, I imagine). You steer this thing from a joystick inside the spa, so anyone cruising around in this rig better have a bathing suit on because there are no other seats onboard.
This little item retails for $125,000, which is more than my first two vacation houses and my first permanent residence. I once went crazy enough to buy a boat. It was a lovely teak lake boat (think On Golden Pond). I found myself onboard, tooting around in it…and I didn’t have to be in a hot tub while I was at it. I suspect the owners of this new little extravagance will use it on average twice the first season, once the second season and then never thereafter. With maintenance added, I think that will mean $50,000 per plunge. That, my friends, is the definition of decadence.