Electrifying News: Bug Zapper Sales Are Stagnating
Bzzz. Bzzz. Pop. Sizzle. Plop.
The night buzzings of small flying insects have droned for nearly 400 million years. Over the past 15 years, the crackle emitted by outdoor electric insect zappers has joined the midsummer night’s din.
But after enormous growth in the late 1970s, insect electrocutor sales have slackened--to less than $80 million last year from nearly $100 million in 1984, by one estimate. The devices’ effectiveness against mosquitoes is increasingly questioned, while retailers have demanded deep discounts from manufacturers. The number of zappers sold has stagnated, prices have plummeted, and makers have left the business in droves.
“Five years ago, there were 30 manufacturers--now there are three or four. . . . The industry is now just one of a basic commodity, and one in which the same numbers are sold year in and year out,” said Stephen M. Sadler, vice president of sales for Stinger Environmental Products, a division of Holbrook, Mass.-based Dejay Corp. and one of two companies that each claim to be the nation’s largest zapper maker.
Sales Slow in State
Memorial Day weekend is a critical period for the industry, he added, with roughly three-quarters of annual sales coming in the 60 days after May 15 as people get ready for summer barbecues and evening back yard parties.
Sales so far this year are the worst in eight or nine years. Customers come swarming when a week of hot weather in spring follows an especially wet winter, bringing bugs out in droves. But this year’s spring has been too cool across much of the country, Sadler said. “You pray for great weather in that 60-day period.”
California has not received enough rainfall this year to breed lots of bugs, he added. “Bug killer sales in California are very, very slow.”
Bug zappers that Sadler and his competition sell are much alike. They typically consist of a high-intensity ultraviolet light surrounded by metal grids carrying an electric current of up to 5,600 volts. The light attracts insects, which are electrocuted as they hit or fly through the grid because the moisture in their bodies conducts electricity and triggers arcing. The electric shock dries out the bug and disrupts its nervous system so that it dies and falls into a pan or to the ground.
Immunity Not an Issue
The electrified grid is typically shielded by an outer protective plastic grid to prevent people from receiving shocks. Touching the electrified grid will not shock a human seriously, as an electrified fence might, because the grid consists of alternating positive and negative wires, said Donald R. Coe, president of Devpro Machines, a Middleport, N.Y., maker of mostly agricultural and industrial zappers used in barns and factories. Pressing a finger against the grid sends a current across the finger to the next wire but not through the whole body, he said.
Unlike pesticides, insect zappers neither pollute nor lose effectiveness to bugs developing resistance. “I’ve yet to find the insect that’s immune to electricity,” Coe said.
To some people, zappers can also be entertaining. “Everyone says, ‘Ooh, that one was fried, barbecued,’ ” said Shari V. Cohen, an El Cajon resident and word processor operator who has been hanging an 18-inch-high zapper lantern on her patio for the last four years.
Yet insect zappers have drawbacks. They do not work well during the day because their lights cannot compete with the sun. By night, they attract the least vexing insects. Moths come swarming, die sparking and litter the ground below with their bodies.
“The first year we got it I was sweeping half an inch of moths a night . . . I couldn’t even see the concrete for the moths,” Cohen said.
But mosquitoes, less attracted by light than by heat and carbon dioxide, are not drawn in as large numbers, industry executives acknowledge. Devpro recommends placing dry ice under a zapper during outdoor parties because the carbon dioxide vapors from evaporation will attract mosquitoes. Heat and carbon dioxide-producing accessories sell for $40 and up, but Stinger’s Sadler charged that these do not work and are “just a gimmick.”
A study in a South Bend, Ind., suburb found that only 3% of the bugs killed by a zapper in a typical 24-hour period were bloodsucking female mosquitoes. Most of the device’s victims were gnats from a small nearby swamp, said Roger S. Nasci, an assistant professor and insect researcher at McNeese State University in Lake Charles, La.
Turning on a zapper did not reduce the number of mosquitoes alighting on Notre Dame graduate students stationed nearby. “I suggest they put them in the home entertainment department at Sears,” Nasci said. “rather than the garden department.”
Cohen said her experiences with mosquitoes confirm Nasci’s research. “They’ll just sit on the outside of the (plastic protective) grid. They never seem to go inside.”
She said she keeps her zapper because she doesn’t like to be bombarded with moths when sitting outdoors in the evening and because birds come snack on the dead, fried bugs in the morning. “It’s like a fast meal on the run in the morning.”
Zappers will reduce mosquito populations, particularly if left on 24 hours a day, but the reduction may not be enough to cut the frequency of mosquito bites appreciably, Sadler said. The electricity cost is nominal, from $2 to $6 per month of continuous use, he adds.
Many people think zappers do not work because they are impatient, he argued. Lots of nocturnal flying insects breed once every two weeks, so only after running the device nonstop for that long does the population decline significantly, he said. “One cannot buy a bug zapper on a Thursday and throw a party on a Saturday.”
Public skepticism about the effectiveness of zappers has hurt sales, leading Montgomery Ward to stop stocking them. “We just didn’t sell enough of them to justify continuing them,” a Ward spokesman said.
But one industry executive argued that such moves reflect a reluctance by some chains to advertise the product adequately. “They weren’t too successful in marketing it. They never got behind it,” said Sal Deyoreo, president of Boston-based Flowtron Outdoor Products, which contests Stinger’s claim to be the nation’s largest zapper maker.
A more serious credibility problem for the U.S. zapper industry than missing mosquitoes concerns the proliferation of cheap imports from Taiwan and elsewhere in East Asia, Deyoreo said. Many of the $10 to $20 imported zappers have such weak light bulbs that they attract few insects, he charged. And the current in their grids can be so weak that bugs stick instead of drying out and falling away.
“In a matter of 15 minutes, they’re covered with insects and they don’t work,” Deyoreo said.
4 Makers Remain
Using electricity to kill flying insects is nothing new. Farmers have been using large, heavy-duty electrified grids for half a century to kill barn flies, said Arthur W. Seeds, executive vice president of the Electronic Pest Control Assn. in Naperville, Ill. But only in the early 1970s did firms such as Flowtron begin producing small, residential zappers mounted on lamp posts or hung from hooks. Even electrified window and door screens are sold now.
The industry boomed into the early 1980s, with 25 domestic manufacturers and sales of 2.7 million zappers worth nearly $100 million in 1984, Deyoreo said.
Today there are four large makers of residential zappers left. Sales fell to about 2.3 million zappers and less than $80 million last year, according to Deyoreo and Seeds. Prices have fallen precipitously as the biggest producers installed expensive equipment to produce zappers with all plastic housings and mountings, thereby eliminating the high labor costs of building metal zappers. Smaller manufacturers who couldn’t afford the new equipment left the industry, Deyoreo said.
Three years ago, the cost of Flowtron zappers ranged from $30 to $175. Now the price ranges from $20 to $80, and the zappers are all plastic except for the killing grids and various electrical fixtures.
Beaten by Retailers
The high cost of buying plastic molds only “put the final nail in the coffin of many manufacturers,” Sadler said. The industry’s gravest problem is that 20 to 25 national chains of discounters and home improvement stores now sell close to 90% of all zappers, he said. Warehouse stores and other mass retailers drove small hardware stores out of the business by selling zappers very cheaply, then demanded bulk purchase discounts that barely covered the cost of making zappers, he charged. “The manufacturers let the retailers beat them up to the point . . . that they went out of business.”
Sadler said sales figures from the Electronic Pest Control Assn.--of which Stinger is a member--are exaggerations. He estimated that at most 1.5 million zappers are sold each year, and are worth $30 million at factory prices and $60 million at consumer prices.
Nasci, who sometimes works in his hometown’s mosquito-infested salt marshes and rice fields near the Gulf of Mexico, puts no trust in zappers and prefers personal repellents.
Chemical repellents last longer when sprayed on clothing than when applied to skin, he said. So for his own use, Nasci sprays “an old cotton work shirt” with repellent, keeps it in a sealed plastic bag and wears it in the fields. Works every time, he said.
WHAT GETS ZAPPED Bugs killed by a bug zapper in 24 hours *
Midges and gnats 2,863
Female mosquitoes ** 107
Male mosquitoes 101
Beetles 69
House flies 43
Caddis flies 41
Moths 37
Marsh flies 12
Leaf hoppers 12
Bees and wasps 2
Total 3,287 * Averages from five midsummer tests, each 24 hours long, conducted in a suburb of South Bend, Ind. ** Only the females drink blood. Source: Roger S. Nasci
