Have Your Credit Card Ready ; the Infomercial Means Business in Its 20th Year

Summary

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Admit it. In a weak moment, at 3 a.m., maybe because you had insomnia, or maybe because you just had a few too many, even you have given in.

Sure, you may claim to change the channel at the first site of Victoria Principal, sitting on a couch and interviewing a cosmetics chemist in a lab coat. But what finally made you cave? Was it that three-step acne care system, so highly recommended by rehabbed and revitalized actress Mackenzie Phillips? Or maybe it was that $45 piece of ab "equipment" - basically a motivational videotape and rubber band to tie around your feet? And yet it seemed like so much more on television, didn't it? At least it did the way they talked about it.

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Extract

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Have Your Credit Card Ready ; the Infomercial Means Business in Its 20th Year

The "they," of course, could have been anybody from Richard Simmons to Suzanne Somers to Dionne Warwick to George Foreman. They've all been trying to seduce you for years. So raise your Ginsu knives triumphantly and toast, shoppers: It's the 20th anniversary of that lucrative piece of American pop culture - the infomercial.

It was 1984 when the Reagan administration lifted government regulations that had limited the number of minutes per hour that could be devote...

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