Swiffer!

Whenever David Carr writes one of his we are doomed doomed pieces, I try to cheer myself up by pondering the excellence of capitalism and its products, with a view to giving one of the better ones that extra boost into product super-stardom that a mention on samizdata surely guarantees. And of all the candidates in range of my personal ain’t-capitalism-great? scanner, I think that the one I’m most impressed by at the moment is Swiffer cloths.

Says Cynthia Townley Ewer of OrganizedHome.Com:

Electrostatic dry sweepers fill a household cleaning niche. While these dry mops won’t replace a damp-mop for stain or dried soil removal, the new sweepers are far superior at picking up and removing dust and dry debris.

Use electrostatic dry sweepers before damp-mopping to remove loose dirt and speed mopping chores. Use them between damp-mopping and instead of daily sweeping or vacuuming.

The cloths alone are great dust removers for televisions and computer equipment, and will take dust from furniture quickly and easily. Without a doubt, these new products represent a true innovation, and have a place in today’s organized home.

I am myself a satisfied Swiffer customer. I find Swiffers invaluable for those deposits of dust that accumulate over the months and years. Whenever, as happens from time to time, I need to rearrange some of my possessions, such deposits as these used to have to be moved as if manoevring a delicate item of scientific investigation, in order to avoid hurling all that dirt into the air and perhaps into my respiratory system, which functions imperfectly at the best of times. Now, I Swiffer the offending deposit. I ensure clean TV and computer screens by Swiffering them also, just as Ms, Townley Ewer says.
In the bad old says, “dusters” would only rearrange dust, often into a far more visible form, while often also stimulated the electromagnetic tendency of whatever I was dusting to hold fast to its dust. Using a vacuum cleaner, necessary for large scale cleaning up after one of my junk-food-ridden soirées, for every little task of this sort is a great nuisance, and also subjects the object one is attempting to dust to physical abuse, unless one goes to the extra bother of changing the extension to something unabusive. And those miniature vacuum cleaners are likewise far more trouble than they are worth.

Personally I don’t hold with “damp-mopping”, except as a last resort or in a the case of a definite spilling of something gooey. If there is one thing that the experienced enemy of dust knows it is to avoid that great enemy of household cleanliness: water. To try to wash dust away is to turn a temporary unpleasantness into a permanently ingrained disaster. (Washing dust, you might say, is the domestic equivalent of trying to solve an irritating but essentially manageable national problem by nationalising it.) Washing only makes sense if water was involved in the creation of the problem in the first place. Dust is dust. The point is to get rid of it, not to turn it into fully-fledged dirt.

No, Swiffers, based on that same tendency of the electromagnetically stimulated object to attract dust, but now turning that principle from his or her enemy into the ally of the householder, are the answer.

Friends who are aware of my living circumstances may be puzzled that I emphasise the value of a product devoted to domestic hygiene. But just because my standards of cleanliness and dustiness are not as high as those of truly civilised people, this doesn’t mean I don’t have any such standards. The difference between tolerably dusty, and dusty to the point where I can’t do anything without creating a dust storm, is, for me, an important distinction. Swiffer cloths are a vitally important ally in one of the few domestic battles that I like to take a bit seriously.