Our occasional Weekend Edition feature “Is It Real? Or The Onion” returns!

Here are three news items you could have seen recently. Which one is fake?

• eBay to Pay Billions for Company With $60m Revenue
• Five-bladed Men’s Razor Introduced
• 1,000 Activists Jointly Nominated For Nobel Peace Prize

Click on “Read the rest of this entry” below to see the answer.

Answer:

It’s a trick question: item #2 was in the Onion in February 2004 (“Fuck Everything, We’re Doing Five Blades”), and was announced by Gillette this week.

It’s all part of a devious strategy. According to the WSJ ($ req’d):

Blades and razors make up more than two-thirds of Gillette’s profit. But the company comes out with a new razor system only every seven or eight years. Each launch is underwritten with a huge advertising campaign, and Gillette rolls out the new blades at a hefty price premium to its predecessors. The company then gradually raises the price of its older razors to persuade men to switch to the new model.

This is what happens in a near-monopoly — Schick is not much of a factor, although its four-blade Quattro has helped: “In the past two years, Schick has boosted its share of the market for replacement blade cartridges to 16% from 10%”

And where will it end? Again, the WSJ:

“Gillette managed to stay at two blades for 27 years and through three major razor systems (Trac II, Atra and Sensor) before going to three blades in 1998. Almost eight years later, Gillette has skipped to five. And Fusion will come less than two years after Gillette pushed some men to leave their Mach3s in the medicine cabinet and buy a juiced-up M3Power.”

Is this where we’re headed?

Here’s an article on the first item, eBay’s offer for Skype, and the third, about the mass Nobel nomination.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 16th, 2005 at 1:34 pm by A Senior Administration Official and is filed under Funny ... to us, Weekend Edition / Features. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.