By Jim Hagarty
OK, explain to me the deal with the patio heaters and fans
You might think that one of these days, modern technological innovation would suddenly come to an end, every possible inventible thing having already been invented. Instead, it is the reverse: The pace of innovation is speeding up all the time. Or is that the pace of marketing?
A while back, I was flipping through a flyer when a photo of a beautiful backyard deck caught my attention. I think what impressed me the most was that the quality and price of the furniture on that deck would exceed the value of the tables and chairs in many people’s homes. In the insides of their homes, that is.
In fact, it occurred to me that this particular arrangement of furniture could easily replace the average person’s inside stuff and I started thinking back to the Lawnchair Years – university and shared apartments and all that. A sturdy lawnchair in those days was a prized possession.
But how wealthy do we have to be to be able to sink hundreds of dollars into furniture that birds will poop on and squirrels go tearing across?
The phenomenon is this. For years, we have been trying to replicate the outdoors inside our homes. We have showers, grow plants, and start fires and even allow birds and four-legged animals – in some cases snakes, iguana and turtles to run and slither around and birds to fly about.
Now, we are taking our indoors, outdoors. And we are willing to spend a king’s ransom to do it. Further proof is needed, you say. Well here it is.
In the photo in that same flyer I referred to above was a stylish outfit known as a patio heater. Now, is this an achievable goal – to warm up the outside?
Here is some more proof. A few weeks later, I saw a similar device, the job of which it is to cool down the patio. Hence, its description as a patio fan.
So, in our obsession to control every minute detail of our environment, we have invented patio heaters to do the job of the sun and patio fans to do the work of the wind.
The person who thought up the patio fan must have turned to someone and said, “Do you think anyone will buy something like this?”
“Send it down to marketing,” would surely have come the reply. “They can sell anything.”
And if you think that isn’t true, ask yourself what would have been your reaction if someone had told you a dozen years ago that you’d be willing today to lay out a few hundred dollars for a wee, high fidelity juke box that fits in your pocket. Or a bicycle powered by an electric motor.
The more educated and populated becomes the world, the more new devices will be created, useful or otherwise.
I talked to a man recently who told me he can open his front door here in Stratford when he is in Toronto, a two-hour drive away, using his smartphone. That’s not something that most of us need, but someday, we probably will have that same gizmo.
And as long as we want our lawns to look like indoor carpets, and our indoor floors to look like big, flat outdoor rocks, the inventors and marketers will keep laughing all the way to their automated banking machines.
