Throwing it All Away

I hate shaving. I don't think I've ever met anyone who doesn't, honestly. If it weren't for the fact that my face itches like hell when I don't shave I'd probably not shave. Well, that and the fact that my beard is a little thin in spots and since I'm in the public eye I should probably only grow a beard if it doesn't make me look like one of the transient "all-day customers" at the library.

Aside from the discomfort inevitably involved in shaving though, the other aspect of shaving I hate is razor blades. First and most problematic to my mind, is that there's absolutely no guarantee when you get a new blade out that it's actually going to do the job without burning you. Sometimes you'll get a good one and everything will be fine, sometimes the new one you get is even worse than the one you just threw away.

Given the unpredictability of the quality of the blades, you'd think that maybe the companies that make the blades would put some more effort into improving the blade itself. But no, apparently their solution is to add even more blades to the cartridge, probably in the hopes that more blades will increase the likelihood that one of them will be halfway decent.

Of course, the more blades and other bells and whistles there are, the more expensive the things get. I started using a 2-blade cartridge with a conditioning strip and a rubber strip when I was in college, because it seemed to work pretty well. I get 5 of these things for about $9. Y'see, to me that's just insane. The problem is that the generic ones are even worse than the brand name ones, so you pretty much have to stick with the brand names. Worse than that, I got a free sample of a 3-blade one once, tried it and almost tore my face off, so I'm sticking with my 2-blade, thank you. But those 3-blade ones are like 4 for $11. The 4 blade ones are even more ridiculous. So here I have to shell out all this cash for something I have to do daily.

I hate being over a barrel like this.

On vacation this summer I forgot my razor at home, and so found myself needing to pick up something to shave with in the interim. Obviously I wasn't going to buy a whole new kit, so I got some disposable razors instead. Son of a gun if these things didn't do a better job than the ones I had been getting. Even more amazing was that I could get 10 of them for $8.

How much sense can this possibly make? A complete razor-- handle, cartridge and blades-- is cheaper than just the cartridge? And apparently just as good? These guys really do have a racket going! But now I'm stuck with a quandary: I'm now throwing away even more plastic than I was before.

I hate this, I really do! Why can't companies just do something that makes sense? Why do they drive us to be wasteful? Why is conservation so damn expensive? It's completely counter-intuitive!

Moral of this post: buy a straight-edge razor.