An interesting angle on this one; using a safety razor would save you money! It might even been true in the days before Razor Acquisition Disorder…
The razors mentioned would peg this advertisement to the 1910’s, 1920’s, or thereabouts. One online resource – which didn’t mention sources – claims 1916 as the date. If that is correct, the claim of 40-50$ saved in a year equals about 950-1200$ today – not an insignificant amount by any stretch of the imagination.
The use of customer reviews and letters of recommendation do – possible to the surprise of people who have grown up since online shopping became a huge thing – go back decades, if not centuries. During my meandering online wanderings I’ve found this example from a century ago.
As far as a little searching can tell me, Ralph V. Hinkle was no one special… not famous, at least not outside his immediate area. An Every-man, if you prefer that term, someone other customers could relate to.
There is off course the possibility of the letter being fake, written by the Rubberset marketing department, but would that be any different than today?
As an aside my oldest brush still in rotation is about a decade old too; an Omega 10048 – it shed a few hairs the first year or so, but is otherwise even better now than when I took it out of the box.
Is this why there are so many vintage Gillettes in near mint condition? You don’t know what to get for your friend, so you buy him a razor… just as several other friends of him did. After all, the ad promises that it’ll be “the happiest hit of the all the gifts at Christmas”.
Guy ends up with half a dozen razors, sticks five in a drawer and uses just one…
If old advertisements are to be believed, wetshavers in the Olden Days must bave been pretty easy to annoy…
