Lucky Tan said:

I became a participant of the GSS today and met a young salesman trying to sell something that will help me to "save on the cost of detergent + water and will result in cleaner laundry". The product turned out to be a plastic ball with beads inside that you put with the laundry instead of using detergent . The salesman showed the big a folder full of scientific studies that showed the ball performed better than detergent. He had newspaper cuttings and a documentary to back up his product. He claimed that many laundry mats in Hong Kong have switched to using this plastic ball instead of detergent to save costs. The ball which uses "nano technology" can be used up to 1000 times and costs $59. I didn't have time to watch his video but found something on the Internet about it:

$59 for a ball that can be used with 1000 batches of laundry would save me something like 9 years of detergent. Wow. Irresistable. When something is too good to be true, I usually have to do some checking but the other shoppers around me were completely convinced and snapped up the ball like hot cakes.

A quick check on the Internet yielded the following:

"The Laundry ball is a pseudoscientific product whose sellers claim that when placed in a washing machine it will clean clothes without detergent.[1] The product is often sold by participants in multilevel marketing schemes.[1]" - Wikipedia article[Link]

Recommended by at82: "When it is too good to be true, it usually is."

Link

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