Daft as a brush

Too many choices. Photo / Getty Images

God, not again. Every single visit to the supermarket, it is the same. I wheel the trolley around the corner in the health and beauty aisle to be confronted by shelves of conundrum. Should I buy the green and white one with blue rubber bits that look like whiskers and a sort of sander thing on the back? Or the small red and blue one with the red and blue stripey bristles? Or maybe I should get the one that looks exactly like the brush I had when I was 10?

There can be few things so tightly calibrated to annoy the living bejesus out of me than trying to find the right toothbrush.

Particularly because I know exactly what toothbrush I want — I want the one I bought the last time. Only it's never there. Somehow, somewhere, there's a black hole — probably in the nexus between what toothbrush manufacturers make and what my supermarket orders — which manages to hoover up every last example of the brush that I've been using for the last few weeks.

So it is that every visit to the supermarket — a fortnightly to three-weekly affair — requires the same five to 10 minutes of hunting, with a rising frustration, for a new brush. Right-wing bores like to bang on about how wonderful the "market" is at delivering what the customer wants at the right price, but it is my opinion that the market doesn't know what the hell it's doing when it comes to the toothbrush.

Could there be a more simple or utilitarian product? No. It needs just two things, a stick-shaped bit to hold on to and a set of soft, flexible bristles designed to clean teeth. Instead the market seems, in recent times, to have gone crazy, turning the humble toothbrush into a perfect example of something that is utterly over-designed and completely over-sold.

In total contravention of the KISS principle, toothbrushes now come with "sonic vibrations" or "flexible" heads or ergonomic handles — can one really get RSI from brushing for five minutes twice a day? — and a multitude of weird, brightly coloured bristle formations allegedly configured to clean deeper. Or something.

Each of these appendages to the otherwise humble toothbrush is always billed on the packaging as being "revolutionary" or a "breakthrough" in design or innovation by the manufacturers. To which I say, bollocks.

The design and packaging of toothbrushes is in constant flux for the simple reason the market demands that things must be changed constantly so that, heaven forbid, we consumers (read: morons) won't get bored.

The result then is what can only be described as a Toothbrush Arms Race in which the humble brush is being loaded with every conceivable mad idea in (what looks like) increasingly desperate attempts to excite consumer interest in what is essentially an extremely boring but useful device.

But of course this nonsense, this consumerism gone barmy, isn't limited to just toothbrushes. It is my habit to wear jeans pretty much every day. I go through a few pairs. But I probably buy new ones only every year-to-18 months. And each time I do, it's the same damned issue: "Sorry, they don't make those anymore," the assistant always says.

This means what should be a five-minute shopping job — find the jeans with the right number (and size), take to the counter, purchase — becomes at least 30 minutes of trying on endless pairs of jeans trying to work out which of the new cuts is closest to the pairs I'm trying to replace.

Again this is the market enforcing change because novelty is apparently the most important driving force, particularly in what marketers call a "mature market." There are, I'm sure, many more examples of this pointless and ultimately depressing change for change's sake. Novelty seems to be a corollary of choice and, if consumerism is a religion, then choice is its god.

Well, I say novelty and choice are bunkum. Their upshot is a constant but unnecessary replacing and displacing of products, meaning the poor consumer — well, this poor consumer — is repeatedly forced to think about things he or she doesn't want to think about, like which of these damned silly toothbrushes to buy?

In a perfect consumer world, one would be able to make such a decision once and be able to stick with it. Instead, I'm going to have to decide what damn silly toothbrush to buy on every shopping trip until the day I die.