Brits spend £9.4bn on household gadgets
12 September 2005
UK residents have forked out over £9.4bn in their lifetimes on household gadgets that they believed were great buys at the time but have rarely, if ever, actually used, according to research by esure.com home insurance.
This figure includes - measured by esure.com for the first time this year - £4.1bn on gifts for friends and family that end up gathering dust. A quarter of people polled (24%) actually admitted to wasting money on buying someone a household gadget as a gift that they suspected would remain in its box.
Esure.com’s annual ‘Useless gadgets’ poll, commissioned by ICM, reveals that the sandwich toaster tops the ‘white elephant’ list for the third year running — that’s around £315m worth of abandoned toastie makers in UK homes. But 2005 sees the debut of the bathroom scales and fancy coffee machine in the top five list with one in three adults guilty of owning them but rarely, if ever, using them.
Esure.com’s predictions for 2006 include the healthy juicer and the novelty ice cream maker. In this year’s poll, 63% of people said they would never use a juicer even if they received one as a present and almost three quarters (73%) of adults gave ice cream makers the cold shoulder by saying that they would definitely be unwanted gifts.
We are officially a nation of hoarders: 23.4m UK adults have banished a useless object to a drawer or cupboard and 10.6m have used their loft or garage to store their dust gatherers. We also have no qualms about cluttering up the houses of friends and family, with 22.3m of UK adults admitting to palming off unwanted items to their nearest and dearest.
Nikki Sellers, Head of Home Insurance at esure.com, said: "Many of us are suckers for advertising and fanatical about keeping up with the latest fads and must-have gadgets. But as a nation we’re guilty of boxing up and stockpiling our white elephant household gadgets in lofts, garages, wardrobes and drawers, leaving them out of sight and easily forgotten."
"But over the years the number and value of these offending items rises, so it’s important to keep an inventory of all your home contents - even your mistake-buys or unwanted gifts - to avoid being left under-insured."
Almost a fifth (18%) of adults have spent over £500 on useless gadgets for either themselves or as a gift for someone, with men wasting more money on dust collectors than their shopping-savvy female counterparts (£361.83 and £238.77 respectively). And 18-24s are fuelling the sales of gimmicky gadgets that are lining our drawers. One in four (23%) would buy a counting bottle opener - which let’s you know how many beers you’ve had by keeping a running total - and a fifth would buy eye massager glasses (21%) with stress-busting, vibrating pads or an automatic card shuffler (18%) as gifts.
