Hawkers Push Wares at Shows : Psst! Wanna Buy Automatic Urinal?
On one side of the aisle, a man touted his device as “a quantum leap in pump technology.” Elsewhere in the same room, someone was demonstrating “the world’s fastest-opening garage door opener.”
Hawking everything from the latest innovation in nuts and bolts to a urinal that flushes when it “senses” you have walked away, 450 exhibitors set up shop Tuesday as a trade show twin bill got under way at the Anaheim Convention Center.
The Design Engineering and the Winter Plant Engineering and Maintenance shows feature new products for home and industry and not-so-new products to make your factory or hospital a safer, cleaner, more efficient place.
The shows--one stressing design, the other maintenance--run through Thursday and are open for $20 a day to anyone in business or industry.
It wasn’t exactly Christmas shopping, but interested buyers strolled the aisles Tuesday to find the purveyor of a new, itty-bitty screw that won’t keep falling out of eyeglasses like the old-fashioned kind and the manufacturer of slipcovers for your otherwise exposed asbestos.
All that was missing was a slicer and dicer. The showroom was very much like watching daytime TV and catching only the commercials.
Amid the often high-pitched, sometimes glitzy competition for prospective customers, it sometimes took a little imagination to connect the sales pitch to the product line.
For example, the young woman who was dressed like a baseball player and wielded a 5-foot baseball bat simply could not explain what her get-up had to do with the hand-cleaning concoction at her booth.
And there was salesman Ted Hill, who calls himself Super Ted--”It’s a psychological thing that helps me on the days I’m not up to snuff”--and is the sales rep for Spartan Manufacturing Co. of Garden Grove, a screw-machine parts manufacturer.
Hill admitted that his eye-catching gimmick--dozens of screws and fasteners floating in a briefcase-shaped block of Lucite--sometimes draws more attention than his product.
“We do get people stopping to look at this, but they aren’t always interested in the product,” Hill said.
Like the veteran salesman he is, Hill said he is always ready to change gears should the marketplace warrant it.
“If we start getting a lot of phone calls, I can go out and start selling these,” he said, hoisting the clear plastic block.
For those who want to get in out of the rain, Thomas M. Oyan of Albany International was demonstrating the “fastest garage door opener in the world,” a window shade-like device that uses an electric motor to roll up a sheet of double-layer, woven-monofilament with a polyvinyl chloride coating that can withstand collisions with vehicles.
And particularly for colleges, hospitals and anyone interested in saving lives, Lincoln Farnum was offering a Copenhagen, Denmark, firm’s resuscitation mannequin.
“You can get one for as little as $670 or up to about 2,000 bucks with a computer . . . that analyzes the effects of your performance,” Farnum said.
Throughout the convention center, there were displays of patching material “with literature available in 13 languages,” self-luminous exit signs, an assortment of coasters and wheels that must be seen to be believed and slogans galore, if not glorious: “Boilers Ain’t Mysterious” and “A Leader in Custom Insert Molded Filter Technology.”
Some of those on hand might find this year’s show and convention a success just by wandering a few aisles from their own booths.
For example, it seems only natural that the company that distributes Krestoth, “the hand cleaner for stubborn dirt,” could benefit from an introduction to the Sloan Valve Co., manufacturer of no-touch urinals, faucets and soap dispensers.
“You never touch anything but yourself,” Sloan Valve Co. spokesman Paul de Boo said of the firm’s restroom devices, which are activated by infared sensors instead of manual knobs and levers.
Why would anyone want a faucet that turned on when a hand came close?
“Cleanliness and disease control,” De Boo intoned. “Everybody washes his hands and goes to turn the faucet off, and that’s the dirtiest part.”
For those who have always longed to say they don’t need a weatherman to tell which way the wind blows, Solarnet, a British firm, has on display its own self-contained weather station for home or office.
“It measures the wind speed, wind direction, temperature, humidity, barometric pressure and rainfall,” explained its designer, Terry Tranter of Bakewell, England.
A digital readout connected to the device by wire can be stationed up to 200 meters away in “house or den,” Tranter said. “Rainfall . . . can be measured in millimeters or tenths of an inch.”
Tranter has hopes that thousands of the devices will sell at about $1,200 a pop to schools; gliding, sailing and hang-gliding clubs, and to anyone to whom “the weather is important.”
