Gadget gaffes: As ye sew, so shall ye grip

Consumers often contact COMBAT without expecting action, but just to “air their beef” or warn others. That was Skowhegan resident Gladys Stillman’s intent when she wrote us about her dissatisfaction with a product she had ordered in response to an “As Seen on TV” advertisement.

Stillman’s finger was perhaps too fast on the telephone dial when she responded to a late-night offer for a “Handy Stitch” hand-held sewing machine. The little rig looked pretty good on TV, whizzing through everything from silk to canvas. And, after all, it cost only about $19.95 plus postage and handling. How could she go wrong; isn’t this better than spending a couple of hundred dollars on a full-size sewing machine? Besides, it only weighs about a pound, can be carried everywhere, and is easy to store. But Stillman might have asked, “Does it WORK?”

“The first thing I realized about this thing,” Stillman wrote, “was that you had to move the Handy Stitch through the material. It didn’t pull the fabric along like a regular sewing machine.” She went on to say that if you didn’t move slowly and feed the fabric along at a uniform rate, the stitches varied widely in distance from one another.

The result looked silly, leaving puckers and unstitched gaps in the fabric. “I had to undo my work several times before I was even half satisfied,” she said. So much for Handy Stitch’s “easy to use” claim.

Next, Stillman realized that the type of stitching was a “chain stitch,” sort of like what you have on the top of a bag of dog food or grass seed. If by accident you broke the thread, the whole thing unraveled. So much for the claim, “Stitches as strong as an expensive machine.”

But Stillman shouldn’t feel alone in her disappointment, COMBAT did some poking around on the Internet and found that a bunch of young people in Oregon tested the Handy Stitch as a home economics class project and had exactly the same experience. After the test, a consumer reporter in Oregon wrote: “The Handy Stitch might be the worst product we’ve tested yet.”

Still want to buy one? Thank Stillman for warning us.

And how about Carol Dinsmore of Machias, who ordered an Easy Grip Jar Opener for five dollars? Dinsmore wrote: “The only thing easy about this thing was to throw it away!”

We need to give Dinsmore extra credit for trying her best to get her money’s worth out of this product, which claimed to be useful in opening any size bottle, from pickles to nail polish. First she tried it on a nail polish cap.

“After yanking at the thing for the better part of 10 minutes, all I succeeded in doing was having the bottle fly out of my hand and splatter on my ceramic tile kitchen floor.” Not one to give up easily, Dinsmore then attacked a large pickle jar. “I finally gave up and opened the jar with my hand,” she said.

Still unconvinced that the Easy Grip wasn’t worth its plastic, Dinsmore took a crack at an old tempera paint bottle.

Splash! Now her kitchen floor looked like “something Andy Warhol might have done during a nightmare.”

Was Dinsmore ready to give up?

No, she wasn’t. “When I tried another bottle, the … plastic thing fell apart!” she huffed. Dinsmore, you have too much time on your hands, not to speak of pickle juice.

Do you have a similar story to tell? Write Forum and keep our readers gripped in stitches.

Consumer Forum is a collaboration of the Bangor Daily News and Northeast COMBAT-Maine Center for the Public Interest, Maine’s membership-funded nonprofit consumer organization. Individual membership $25, business rates start at $125 (0-10 employees). For help and information write: Consumer Forum, Bangor Daily News, PO Box 1329, Bangor 04402-1329.