The Courant puts Shamwow! to the test

Over the weekend, the Hartford Courant ran an article about the Shamwow! "super chamois cloths." You've probably seen the commercials for these on television. The shill, I mean, salesman for the Shamwow! is a guy named Vince Offer (as the article points out, this is his actual name), who practically tells you you're an idiot if you don't purchase these wondercloths immediately, as if chamois technology just was invented last week. Here's a shot of Vince in action:

Well, the Courant went ahead and bought a pack of Shamwow!s and put them, pardon the pun, thorough the wringer. Not shockingly, the results weren't spectacular:

"Shamwow holds 20 times its weight in liquid," Offer claims. And to illustrate this, he smushes a rolled-up Shamwow into a glass pie dish filled with water and the liquid is instantly sucked up into the cloth. "Doesn't drip. Doesn't make a mess," Offer says, unrolling the Shamwow and dangling it over the countertop.

It's an impressive demonstration, and one that I imagine moves a lot of merchandise at carnivals and county fairs. As luck would have it, I own a nearly identical pie dish, giving me a chance to test that amazing absorption for myself. But no matter how I rolled and folded, and folded and rolled, I could never quite soak up an entire pie dish worth of water — and certainly not without a steady drip when I unfurled the waterlogged cloth.

Moreover, that pie dish doesn't come close to holding 20 times the Shamwow's weight. In repeated tests, I couldn't get the Shamwow to hold on to more than about eight times its weight. That's still impressive for such a thin cloth, but it's a far cry from the infomercial claim.

The tester goes on to try more of the Shamwow! commercial claims, to similar results. It's a pretty entertaining article. You can find the complete story here.