The trip to sharper image was not complete until you got to sit in the massage chair.
this post was submitted on 30 Mar 2024
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The spirit of it still exists in temu ads. Turn off your ad blocker for a minute and you'll be inundated with cheap plastic things that you think are great ideas and you'll use once and forget about.
That’s a great point.
You can't truly replicate the experience until you take those Temu products and mark the prices up 500% though.
Yeah dude that stuff always blew my mind as a kid. Browsing the real sharper image store then was a treat too. I got a skymall hot dog toaster one Christmas and it was amazing.
I'm convinced that all the stupid shit in Skymall is still available on the Internet, but I miss having it all collected in one place. The curated ridiculousness was perfect.
You mean like skymall.com?
Big foot statue is there. It's legit.
Edit: although many, many things are listed as "sold out". Most things, in fact.
I used to love going into The Sharper Image and Brookstone stores at the mall when I was a kid.
I used to love going in those two stores to sample the massage chairs.
I got on a plane a few weeks ago and realized that I didn’t have headphones. I would have really liked something to read. AA does offer 20 free minutes of WiFi so I opened a bunch of tabs in my browser, but a skymall would ah e been read for sure.
Always wanted those shoes with the spring in your step
It's a map and you JUMP to CONCLUSIONS!
This idea, this is the worst idea I have ever heard…
Yes, Tom. Horrible.
I miss the Edge Company. It was like someone took The Sharper Image and slapped a medium-thick coat of 90's rad on it with a mild focus on EDC-style pocket junk.
It sounds like a clone of Hot Topic but aimed at the raver crowd.
It was more of an edge lord vibe
Wait, Skymall isn't a thing anymore? Here I thought I was just picking shitty airlines...
https://www.flyingsmarter.com/what-happened-to-skymall
"SkyMall declared bankruptcy in January of 2015, but they were purchased in April 2015 and relaunched the following month as an online retailer. There was a plan to get back into planes but that never really happened. Today, SkyMall is still an online retailer."
Huh, all online now...
I was more confused about what SkyMall even was. Even if I never went into one, I knew what Sharper Image was. I thought SkyMall must have been a regional chain.
Sharper Image style catalog in the seat back pockets on airplanes.
Yeah, I don't fly if I can help it and I think frequent flyers overestimate how ubiquitous air travel is.
A quick Google search shows both companies are still in business, so not much to miss? I imagine they are put SkyMall on some airlines
A ton of Sharper Image stuff gets sold at Walmarts in the "As Seen On TV" section.
Frys Electronics had like 1/4 of their store dedicated to this "As seen on TV" junk for a while before they closed down.
Wow. I didn’t even bother searching. Just assumed since I no longer saw it in the plane backseat they weren’t around anymore.
Nope, not one bit.
Not really. The world has changed so much that I don't think there's space for them anymore. But they were pretty great when I was a dumb kid.
Wait what? Have you seen what people order on temu or even amazon? It's way way worse now.
Skymall and Sharper Image just couldn’t produce enough low quality stuff. They needed to produce single use toaster ovens.
I loved that stuff but never got to buy anything really. Probably for the best it was all junk in the end. Stuff that looked cool but you didn't need any of it really.
I did have one of their CD players that had cool blue lights and a motorized door that opened down. That thing was pretty wicked. I remember I didn’t have the remote for it for some reason, so I casually stole one from the display model at the sharper image store in the mall.
But I felt like I needed ALL of it. of course couldn't afford any of it.
And for all the people like me who wanted all that fun stuff, there were probably some people out there who COULD afford all of it.
How about the DAK catalogs?
Or the "Things You Never Knew Existed" catalogs, which were by the guys that used to sell a bunch of the stuff in the back of comics, Boys' Life, etc (Johnson Smith Company) - X-Ray specs, fake dog poop, etc. But on steroids. Selling huge magnet things, car kits, Mr Mooney dolls, weird statues, magic kits, fake rocks, etc.
Edit: LOL, I found one. Man, brings me back to going through as a 9 year od:
https://archive.org/details/the-johnson-smith-company-catalog-913-circa-1991-starbrite
I convinced my mom to let me order some kind of “mega mind obelisk” from one of those. She kept saying how stupid it will be and I will regret it. “Be a good lesson learned”.
Until it showed up. I got a 6” tall marble obelisk that was the coolest thing ever. Didn’t teach me anything, but I had it for a long time and thought it was neat to look at.
Why have I never owned a wrist kite???
DAK catalogs were wild. Each item had a magazine article length description that was clearly bullshit. But by the end you're certain that the constant emptiness you feel is from not owning the World's Best 16 Channel Stereo Graphic Equalizer.
Holy shit. Well I still have the EQ, and also the Spectrum Analyzer attached to my new stereo.
Don’t recall that.
For like a minute then I watch a movie on my phone
I miss when the products themselves weren't cheap garbage. Back in the early 00s they hit a stride of products that were cooler versions of products available everywhere else, same function, better form.
I like seeing Sharper Image stuff in thrift stores. Take their stuff out of the curated experience of their old mall stores, and it's obvious that it's plastic garbage.
Only if my battery runs out on the plane.
Do any Canadians remember The Little It Store?
Sometimes I miss DAK - I had their bread maker and gave it to my Dad when I moved overseas, and it made excellent - if round - loafs.