Your Kitchen Knives Don't Work.

Deep within the ranks of products you neither want nor need is the sonic blade. This electric serrated knife oscillates when it cuts, which its makers claim makes cutting easier than with a normal knife. The goal of this infomercial is to convince us that we need the sonic blade because our normal knives simply do not work.

Is this true? Do we really need the Sonic Blade? Of course not. Humans have been using knifes to cut food for millennia. Knives are not really as bad as the Sonic Blade's makers would have us believe. A well made, sharpened knife can do almost anything you need it to. But Emson, the company that markets the Sonic Blade, wants to make you think that your knives are not good enough. Their goal is to implant an annoyance with our kitchen tools, so that we convince ourselves that our we need to replace our knives with that amazing, miraculous Sonic Blade.

The makers of this advertisement do something almost every maker of every informercial has done. They tell their viewers that what they possess is not good enough, and that if they want to make their lives so much easier, they should buy the product. In this case, the advertisers are saying that kitchen knives aren't adequate, and the only way to overcome this inadequacy is to buy the Sonic Knife.

The advertisers, however, are being very subtly dishonest. Look at the first few images in the clip. If the makers of the commercial had used a serrated knife while cutting their bread or sandwiches, they may not have turned out so "squashed" and "smushed." Most of the other foods that they used, especially the fruits and vegetables, can be cut with a normal knife without any extreme difficulty, yet they claim that to be able to cut celery and strawberries, you need a Sonic Blade.

Through intelligent tricks and some slight subterfuge, the makers and advertisers of the Sonic Blade have attempted to convince us that we need their product. The truth is, advertisers do this all the time. Every commercial or advertisement that we see is trying to convince us that something about our lives is unsatisfactory to us. We, then, must do the rest and buy their product. That way, we can make ourselves happy, at least until the next racket comes along.