Robinhood is the secret brand of golf ball you may have seen advertised in airline magazines. The brand name “is sealed inside the box, a secret between buyer and seller,” says the manufacturer, H&L Labs of Norwalk, Connecticut, in an ad. Why the secrecy? The ball’s composition and dimple aerodynamics make it fly farther than regular golf balls. Because it sidesteps USGA specs, it cannot be used legally in play. Yet it looks just like a regular ball. If your partners don’t know the secret brand name, no one’s the wiser. Coyly hints H&L’s pitch, “While golf prides itself on being a gentleman’s game, it seems that more than 40,000 gentlemen—and ladies—are playing with these innocent-looking buzz bombs…. more money is going to change hands with this little white bandit than all the tournament purses put together.”
Klipette nose-hair clipper, another staple of small mail-order ads in the back of magazines, leads a double life. Apparently, a substantial portion of distributor profits has come from rental of a secret mailing list of Klipette customers.
Figure it this way. Anyone can trim nose hair with ordinary cuticle scissors. Those who feel they must have a special clipper can get one at a drugstore. So the folks responding to Klipette ads include people concerned about nose hair but too embarrassed to face a drugstore clerk and ask for a nose-hair clipper. For whatever reason, that mentality is just right for some direct-mail pitches. According to a Consumers Union report, a Washington financial newsletter reported strong response to a mail subscription campaign directed to Klipette buyers—none of whom suspected where the newsletter got their names.
One of the firms that runs magazine ads for the Klipette is the Complex Company of Waipahu, Hawaii. As an experiment for Big Secrets, we ordered the Klipette from the Complex Company, using a fictitious name. That way, any subsequent mail arising from the transaction could be identified. Nothing came for about ten months. Then the fake identity resurfaced with a mailing advertising several products, none of them having much to do with nose hair.
There was a free sample of “Potent-8,” a sort of alleged aphrodisiac claimed to “arouse and strip any woman of her normal defenses.” The sample smelled like ether.
The mailing touted a book, Seven Steps to Psychic Mind Control, that helps the reader “turn women into putty” and “will have YOU scoring at work, parties, or on the streets!”
“Pad-A-Panty” is just what it sounds like, a padded bra for the buttocks (“the easy way to a ‘wow’ figure that men will notice and women will envy”).
The mailing also offered an assortment of weight-loss schemes, including a book, an exercise machine, a body wrap, pills (a “mild stimulant”), and a record or cassette containing subliminal messages to discourage overeating.
The Klipette is not the only mail-order gismo used to create mailing lists. What is remarkable about the Klipette list is the profit picture. The Klipette is manufactured by Hollis Co., a New York cutlery firm, but distributed by various mail-order houses nationwide. The distributor profit on the sale of the Klipette cannot be much. If they clear 6 percent of a typical $2.99 retail price, the profit is only $.18. But each purchase can mean another name on the mailing list. Mailing lists sell for anywhere from $.03 to $.75 a name. With luck, a given list may be sold over and over. Are the Klipette retailers in the business of selling nose-hair clippers, or lists of people who buy nose-hair clippers? Apparently both.
According to Consumers Union, other inexpensive items or services that have been used to build mailing lists include the GI Joe Fan Club (it costs money to join, so the membership roster is a list of kids with big allowances and near-zero sales resistance); Halbert’s, Inc. (an Ohio firm that sells alleged family coats of arms); the Kozak Drywash (a car-buffing cloth; the Republican Party used a list of buyers to solicit contributions); the “ant certificates” purchasers of ant farms must send in (with their name and address) to get their ants; and many mail-refund or free-product offers.
Crest toothpaste is the object of two secretingredient rumors—one about “sand” and another about “rat poison.” Actually, Crest has no secret ingredients other than its flavoring. Everything else is spelled out on the ingredients panel. Among those label ingredients is “hydrated silica.” Sand is silica. Crest’s silica is certainly processed and finely ground. Ultimately, all industrial silica comes from sand, quartz, or the like. So is there sand in Crest? Well, no, not if you mean grains of silica of the size normally called sand. But yes, if you’re willing to trace back the chain of raw materials far enough.
The rat-poison story is likewise a matter of interpretation. Crest used to contain something it called Fluoristan. Fluoristan was a trademarked preparation of stannous fluoride, a chemical that prevents cavities. Then Crest’s manufacturers discovered that another fluoride preparation, the one now called Fluoristat, is better at preventing cavities. Out went Fluoristan, and in went Fluoristat. The active ingredient of Fluoristat is sodium fluoride. Sodium fluoride, in turn, is a chemical that otherwise finds use as a rat poison. In fact, sodium fluoride has earned something of a bad name among rat poisons because it is toxic to humans as well as to rats. (It was once mistaken for powdered milk at a hospital for the elderly. The patients complained that breakfast tasted soapy, but no one believed them. Some died.) The level of sodium fluoride in Crest is far below the toxic level, of course.
Wholly untrue are the persistent rumors of a secret significance to the Proctor & Gamble logo on Crest and dozens of other familiar products. A story apparently starting in southern Minnesota in 1980 claims that the moon face symbolizes the acquisition of Proctor & Gamble by Reverend Sun Myung Moon and/or his Unification Church. But the Moonies don’t own Procter & Gamble, and the logo has been on Procter & Gamble products for over a century.
A variation of the story finds a secret number in the logo’s stars. If you take a pencil and connect the stars properly, the result is three not-very-convincing 6s—the biblical number of the beast and, to believers, evidence of Satanism in Cincinnati. The top five stars become a horizontal 6 (with top at right); the middle four stars form a vertical 6; the bottom four become a rotated 6 dipping slightly below the horizontal. Curved lines and considerable imagination must be used. If you count the stars, the total is thirteen—the head count at the Last Supper.
Liquid Drāno, meanwhile, enters into a weird ritual for predicting the gender of an unborn child. The Drackett Company, Drāno’s manufacturer, tries to discourage the so-called Drāno sex test. Dräno, after all, is dangerous stuff to be playing around with. During the sixth month of pregnancy, a sample of an expectant mother’s morning urine is mixed with an equal amount of Liquid Drāno. The concoction will fizz. The color of the resulting liquid is supposed to predict sex: green for a boy, yellow for a girl. It’s right about half the time.
Welcome Wagon-type services are sometimes spies for credit bureaus. Newcomers are a problem for credit reporters. They’re the people creditors are most likely to want information on and yet the people most likely to have an empty file. Most welcome services have names patterned after “Welcome Wagon,” but not all are affiliated with Welcome Wagon International. Many services are sponsored by the local credit bureau, which hopes you’ll tell the smiling Welcome Hostess why you really had to leave town.
Chevrolet, Buick, and Cadillac odometers cannot be rolled back—at least not without it being apparent to any used-car dealer. Since 1969 General Motors cars have had two thin white plastic flags, normally held out of view by a seal, in the odometer case. Tampering with the odometer breaks the seal, and the flags drop into view. They appear as two telltale vertical lines on either side of the thousands’ digit—for example, 3|1|820.1.
GM dealers seem to have benefited most from the device. Few customers know what to look for. Absence of the lines is no guar antee of accurate milage. Dealers can buy replacement seals (from independent manufacturers, not GM) to conceal the lines on a doctored car.
Tia Zolin Placenta, a hair conditioner used in many salons, is said to come from human placentas. It is a straw-colored liquid—with a white sediment—that comes in a single-use sealed vial. The vial is shaken and broken in a towel. The liquid is massaged into the hair. It is not rinsed out—if there really is placenta in Tia Zolin, it is in the hair of anyone who has just used it.
Where do they get human placentas? Tia Zolin Placenta is manufactured by Hask, Inc., of Great Neck, New York. In response to a letter asking about the product, a Hask vice-president confirmed that there is human material in Tia Zolin. But what they call placenta comes from human umbilical cords, not placentas per se. Hask says it gets the umbilical cords from hospitals “in much the same way that human blood and other vital organs are obtained.”
Gucci shops have a secret store-within-a-store, the Galeria. Located in the major U.S. Gucci outlets, the Galeria is on a floor of its own above street level. In New York, for instance, it’s the fourth floor of the 2 East 54th Street shop. To keep out hoi polloi, the Galeria is accessible only by elevator, and you need a special gold key to get to the right floor. Gucci distributes the gold keys to its best customers. (If you push the floor number of the Galeria without inserting the key, the elevator doesn’t move.) Galeria merchandise runs heavily toward jewelry in the high five-figure range.
Bank of America’s Beverly Hills, California, branch at 9461 Wilshire Boulevard has much the same thing—a hush-hush department upstairs for its wealthiest depositors, with no waiting in line for tellers.
Ma Maison, Los Angeles’ celebrity eatery at 8368 Melrose Boulevard, keeps out the triptik-and-Bryce-Canyon-decal crowd with an unlisted phone number: (213) 655-1991.
Northwest Orient Airlines’ “club” has visibility zero. Like most of the airline clubs, Northwest’s “Top Flight Lounges” were started as a free perk for heavy travelers and those in a position to help the airline—corporate travel directors, Civil Aeronautics Board officials, celebrities who might be photographed coming off a plane. In 1966 the CAB decided such invitation-only clubs were unfair. Most airlines started publicizing their clubs, opening them to anyone, and tacking on an annual or lifetime membership fee. But Northwest (and until 1982, Delta) chose not to publicize its club. Officially Northwest’s club is not a club at all but a set of free lounges for the enjoyment of all persons holding Northwest tickets. The catch is, Northwest has never made it easy for average passengers to learn where the Top Flight Lounges are—or even that there are such lounges. The lounges are said to be hidden away behind nondescript doors or in airport culs-de-sac. Unless someone with the airline decides that you’re Northwest’s kind of person, you’re on your own.
Samsonite luggage may be prone to extra scrutiny from customs inspectors. The reason is a South American brand of luggage, Saxony, that looks just like Samsonite but features a false bottom that can be used for drugs or other contraband.
IBM typewriter ribbon is a boon to industrial spies: The used plastic ribbon contains a razor-sharp impression of everything typed. And only the top-level correspondence is likely to be typed on one-use ribbon. That makes sifting through corporate trash bins all the easier.
Tattle-Tape is the name of the bookstore security system requiring electronic detectors at the exits and a rectangular “desensitizer” at the cashier stands. The customer is given to understand that each book must be passed, spine down, over the desensitizer to prevent tripping the alarm. Yet if you’ve ever searched for an electronic bug in the spine after buying a book, you probably didn’t find anything.
The secret of the Tattle-Tape system is that there isn’t anything to find in most of the protected inventory. It is a spot-check system. Only a few selected books contain the Tattle-Tape strip. The strip is thin, brownish, and self-adhesive. It is not placed inside the book’s spine but rather on one of the pages, as close to the spine as possible. The routine of passing every book over the desensitizer is mainly a deterrent. Desensitized or not, the books not containing a strip can be carted out by the wheelbarrow without setting off the alarm.
The 3M Company, Tattle-Tape’s manufacturer, is close-mouthed about the mechanics of the system. The Tattle-Tape seems plainly to be a magnetic strip. If so, it could probably be erased with a pocket magnet. That, perhaps, is what the desensitizer does. Those who purchase a book with a strip may find it objectionable and hard to remove. For this reason, and the labor costs of placing the strips, bookstore managers try to avoid using the strips except where most necessary. Promotional literature of the 3M Company advises using Tattle-Tape strips in “high-theft books,” “books near doors,” and “volumes over $20.00.”
A bookstore using the Tattle-Tape system may return unsold books—with active strips—to their publishers. The publishers, in turn, may ship these books to different stores that don’t have the Tattle-Tape system. Books sold at these stores will not be desensitized. If the purchasers take their books into another store or a library, they may trip the alarm system—and be at a loss to explain what has happened.