Invention
The Rise and Fall of Snuffy the VAC-a-derm
Limited resources leave invention open to theft
I’m almost 70 years old now. This is the story my youngest son brings up to taunt me. “We could have been rich dad!”
If necessity is the mother of invention, mom was kicking me in the ass in 1978. I was in the retail beauty supply business and much of our merchandise arrived buried in poly-foam peanuts. No sooner would a shipment arrive than a customer would ask for something out of stock on the shelf. The search would begin, through the 30 or 40 boxes of merchandise covered in peanuts. The stock room would be swimming in peanuts by the time the item was found. Never was the sought after item in the first ten or twenty boxes, but invariably in the last ten or twenty.
Now a typical clerk would probably ask the customer to return after the new shipment was sorted and stocked on the shelves. But that clerk would not last long working for my dad. My dad would rather turn all the boxes upside down than miss a sale. So, the hunt and the mess was inevitable. Poly-foam peanuts drove us crazy.
I suppose the manufacturers of poly-foam peanuts had to come up with a dispenser to make their product useful and…