Phil Mushnick

Phil Mushnick

TV

Underneath the Hanes’ label scam

I suppose it was inevitable. The World Health Organization, citing the sustained global population explosion, now estimates that there are two suckers born every minute.

Ah, modern, TV-delivered marketing. Where once the goal was to create a demand — a frenzy, if everything breaks right — for products that few folks need and eventually, come trash night, they realize they only briefly wanted, there’s a new ploy to enjoy:

Create and sell a cure to a disease that no one knew they had because they never had it.

To that absurd end, we bring you a series of Hanes men’s underwear commercials starring Michael Jordan, ads in which we’re shown and told that stitched labels in the back of undershirts and undershorts have for years caused men both social embarrassment and insufferable discomfort.

To remedy both afflictions, Hanes has removed the stitched labels and replaced them with stamped labeling.

What kept ’em? Where has this been all our lives?

Over the last several weeks I conducted an informal survey — i.e., I mostly was dressed in jeans, sneakers and a golf shirt — of male friends and family and their friends and family, to determine the extent of their social embarrassment and physical unease as per the wearing of stitched-label undergarments.

What I learned was stunning: No one ever had such a problem. In fact, some seemed far more annoyed by my questions than the worst annoyance that a pair of stitch-labeled briefs could cause.

And then the final questions:

By creating both this disease and cure for a problem from which none ever suffered, was Hanes pulling our legs, giving us all a wedgie? Isn’t Hanes simply saving factory production costs by stamping labels on undergarments rather than having them sewn on?

And then have Michael Jordan join in the TV pitch — a farce — to sell the entire thing as the meeting of innovation and ingenuity in service to men’s better health, welfare and pursuit of happiness? Sold!


If only our local TV news shot-callers would look to the west, now and then; New Jersey’s cities and suburbs are rich in fascinating news besides floods and snowstorms — the real kind of snowstorms as opposed to those underachievers hysterically forecasted and prophesied as the end of the world.

For example, in October a North Jersey police officer, driving his car, collided with a motorcyclist in Paterson. The cyclist was hospitalized. A witness said that the driver of the car had blown a stop sign.

That officer — the driver of the car — was returning from a banquet in which he accepted a traffic safety award on behalf of his department.

This month a 65-year-old NJ high school teacher lost her license for three months after a drunken driving conviction. She’d been stopped at 1 a.m. for reckless driving, then refused to submit to a breath test.

In order to have her license returned, she must attend classes to learn about the mortal dangers and consequences of driving while impaired.

At the high school in which she works, she supervises courses on alcohol and drug abuse, as well as the instruction of safe driving standards.

But such stories, just across the river, don’t make noise or news. If they’d occurred in Queens or Westchester or on Long Island. . .

Murders in Paterson, Plainfield, Newark and Jersey City — all a short train/bus/car ride from Manhattan — are regularly committed and routinely ignored as if they occurred far away, as if the news needs of Jersey residents are served by other TV stations.


Lindsay Lohan plans to write a tell-all? Fascinating. Given that she has spent so much of her life passed out or semi-conscious, how much all can there be to the tell?