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Too Incompetent To Operate A Blanket / Advertising

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Because Too Incompetent to Operate a Blanket is extensively based in advertising, and there's a large number of examples, the Advertising entries were moved to a separate page. This trope is especially abominated on bad-advert deconstruction site Ad Turds.

The Trope Namer and related products:

  • The commercials advertising "Snuggie Wearable Blankets" (which are, for all intents and purposes, a thickened hospital gown), which begin by showing a woman who simply could not make a standard blanket work. As stated on the main page, originally the blankets were created for wheelchair users, the disabled, or even the mentally disabled who quite literally couldn't use a regular blanket comfortably (rather in the same manner people in hospitals wear those backless gowns rather than regular clothing). Fair enough. However, when able-bodied individuals find their blankets triumphing over them, it becomes logically painful. The best part of the commercial is that the "blanket" she's too incompetent to use is actually a decorative throw - in other words, it's about three feet long. No wonder she can't get warm! This was satirized in Jacks Films' Gag Dub video for the "WTF Blanket."
  • Apparently you can also buy them for your dog! The commercial even has a small dog in a Snuggie wearing glasses and reading a newspaper. Based on what the ad shows, the company is trying really hard to tap into the Mr. Peabody & Sherman niche of glasses-wearing anthropomorphic dogs. And that is also parodied by Jacksfilms here.
  • There is also the competing Phrobi, a blanket-robe that covers your back as well as front, for those who are too incompetent to operate a Snuggie without showing everybody their naughty bits.

Parodies:

  • This trope is parodied by Big Spot.com, which invokes this for such silly products as a self-bouncing yo-yo and a neck shelf. Then the ad freezes to point out how absolutely terrible these fake ads look, before pitching the Big Spot.com service, where people can get paid to test products.
  • Mocked by Game Trailer's ads for their Xbox app, which show flailing individuals too inept to move their fingers out of the way to watch a video on their phone. Cut to the video watchers celebrating their new power to watch the videos on their TV, one of them wearing a Snuggie.
  • In the ad campaign for Subaru's 2010 Outback, one commercial plays the aforementioned Snuggie commercial... until a man takes a crowbar to the screen and drives off in his Outback, accompanied by the words, "Maybe you should get out more." They eventually created a follow up featuring a Parody Commercial called "Lap 'n Snack", for those who can't balance a bowl on their knee. It even had its own full commercial and Facebook page!
    • One stand-up comedian has expressed his disappointment that the Lap 'n Snack was not a real product. He wanted one, and felt cheated when it turned out to just be a car commercial.
  • Parodied in a Vat19 ad for a microwave bacon cooker, in which it shows someone cleaning up an unrealistically giant mess apparently caused by cooking bacon in a pan, and another person accidentally burning himself cooking stovetop bacon, all while cheesy trombone music plays.

Other Specific Ads:

Product Named:

  • A commercial for AFN.net showed how convenient it is to use compared to the general internet, since it features conveniently organized information, while the man trying to use the internet in general was distracted and ended up looking at LOL cats. Of course, the man using the general internet might have been more successful had he not been banging his fists randomly on the keyboard.
  • A particularly egregious example is the Kickstarter video for the "Air Selfie", a camera drone that allows users to take pictures of themselves at any distance they want. At one point a man trying to take a picture of himself and his large group of friends at a party is having trouble using a selfie stick (a stick with a button on it), but he's somehow able to control a tiny quadrotor drone without any problems.
  • Some older ads for Apple computers feature testimonials from supposed former Windows users who lack the most basic skills with electronics in general. One woman complained that she couldn't figure out how to turn on her Windows PC.
  • AT&T's two phones ad. Using two Verizon phones to surf the web and talk on the phone simultaneously might not be a common task, but you'd think this guy was trying to juggle them, he drops them so often. And the solution to his problem, as shown in the commercial? Is it a new device, or a service? No, it's the smug guy holding the phone for him. Apparently, the 3G deal is that AT&T provides you with a manservant who holds things for you, which Verizon doesn't. Furthermore, AT&T's phone wouldn't solve his problem. He wants to be able to talk on the phone and surf the net at the same time. Even if his phone could do both at once, he can't talk while looking at his phone, and he can't surf the net if the phone's up to his ear. He'd need a headset of some kind, which would solve his juggling problem anyway.
  • Ads for the Atomic Lantern, a heavily-built lantern that is very resistant to the elements, feature a man trying to eat his dinner during a power outage while holding a flashlight underneath his chin, with it inevitably falling onto his food beneath him. Apparently, no one thinks to simply put their flashlight or a regular lantern in the middle of the table to eat during a power outage.
  • Commercials for Bake Pops showcases people that can't operate cake but somehow can put cake on a stick with no problem.
  • There's a pic that made the rounds on gaming forums a while back: It was from a Best Buy, where the employees had affixed stickers to all the copies of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare for Xbox 360 that cheerfully offered to "Let us install it for you!"
    • Presumably they mean the Xbox 360 itself. A process which involves color matching a trio of cables to your television along with a power cord and Ethernet cable and should take about three minutes, tops. Or if you have an HDMI cable, takes less than thirty seconds, ten of which are spent making sure the cable's the right way.
    • Here's how these things happen: Someone in marketing/sales came up with the "Let us install it for you!" thing for software to improve sales among the computer-illiterate as well as spread the Geeksquad name around the store, and the bosses thought it was a solid idea. Merchandising printed out a billion of those stickers and the bosses (themselves mostly computer-illiterate) said "Stick these on all your best-selling software." The store managers (generally computer-illiterate) pass the order down. The younger kids and gamers who work at Best Buy (the real computer-literate ones) would mention how it's a stupid idea to put them on console games, but the manager would reply "Whatever, someone from upper management is coming next week and they want to see stickers."
    • It won't stop. Now they're charging $30 for PS3 firmware updates. For readers who don't own a PS3, the update process is as follows: push left on the controller a few times until you get to the options menu. Select firmware update. Agree to terms and conditions. Wait a few minutes as PS3 automatically updates itself. Apparently this is esoteric enough to be worth $30 if you can do it.note  Admittedly, there are users either without access to high-speed, unlimited Internet, or really as dumb as this trope suggests.
      • Best Buy's Geek Squad, or any electronic store that has a computer & electronic department, offers customers to do the most basic things like installing software, running virus checks, or just moving files from the hard drive to a flash drive for a pretty penny. Granted, there are people out there who really have no idea how computers work except the basics (generally the older population that didn't grow up with them), or situations where the user literally can't do these things for themselves (like transferring files off of a computer with a corrupted OS), but even then...
  • The person in the Big City Slider Station commercial trying to make normal burgers simply should not be allowed near a stove. Note how he goes on and on about how you can actually put stuff on your slider after cooking or cook them together with onions with the BCS Station, as if you couldn't already do that with a slider cooked the traditional way. For extra fun, when he says "Clean-up's a breeze!" the magic hands use a paper towel to dab delicately at a BCS Machine that has clearly never been used, ever. note 
  • The commercial for Big Top Cup Cakes shows two kids looking very bored over regular sized cupcakes, only to look ready to dig in as soon as Mom presents a Big Top cupcake. Also, the ad also shows how easy it is to make Big Top Cup Cakes. Just mix the ingredients, pour, bake, and decorate. Y'know, kind of like regular sized cupcakes? Or just an even bigger regular cake, if cupcakes are somehow boring.
  • Commercials for both Bing and text-message-based info service KGB show people who can't figure out Google. "There's sooo many links!" Though at least KGB has the niche market of people without smartphones. The Bing example is especially silly, since Bing generally has as many links as Google. It even shows a picture of a Bing search with links at the end. The Bing people also don't seem to realize that the point of a search engine is to find information, and not having as many links isn't exactly a selling point. Also note that if you put in the exact name or a decent description of what you're looking up, what you're looking for will almost always be the first link that comes up, probably over 99% of the time, or elsewhere on the first page (usually toward the top, like the second to fourth). And it became Hilarious in Hindsight after Google accused Bing of stealing its links. This video sums up the comparison very well.
  • This advert for Bright Feet Slippers begins with a girl who can't seem to get around the house late at night without injuring herself or waking her parents up. The advert tries to make it seem as if the built-in lights will help you, but using a flashlight or any of the myriad devices nowadays that generate light works just as efficiently - as would, of course, not leaving several toys out in the middle of every room for people to stumble over later.
  • There's a product out there called the Broccoli Wad. Despite its name, it's really a band that you put on your dollar bills. Why someone would want to use it instead of a wallet or a purse is never quite explained — the only reason given is that it's "easier than a wallet" and that "wise guys don't carry their money in a wallet". If you can't handle something as simple as a wallet, you probably shouldn't be handling money. Even better, the reason it's named Broccoli wad is because the 'inventor' was inspired by... the rubber band that a stalk of broccoli was wrapped with. Which is mentioned in the commercial. So, instead of paying for this (a silicone rubber band with a small metal plate saying 'Broccoli Wad' that, at current, costs almost $90), buy some actual broccoli, get some broccoli and a rubber band to bundle your money with for much cheaper.
  • The commercial for Butter Express begins with a video of someone failing to spread butter on toast without completely destroying the toast. Apparently, it's very difficult to spread butter without getting it all on your hands, overcutting or undercutting it or without getting the butter stick full of crumbs.
  • Citizen Bank's "Ding" commercial shows a woman struggling to use a credit card correctly (and, in the full version, a man struggling to insert cash into an ATM) before then showing a woman swiping her phone over a scanner, making a "Ding" noise as everyone else stares at her in shock. At no point does the commercial explain how this phone ding thing actually works, only implying that it somehow works better than ATMs and credit card scanners by showing the technology of those devices at their most frustrating. Also, this commercial is a little different than others on this page by showing technology being incompetent rather than people.
  • One of the lead up ads to the release of Dungeons & Dragons 4th edition was to show gamers flummoxed by the current edition's complicated rules… bearing in mind this was an ad targeting current users of a product made by the same people as the new product.
  • Ads for Dyson vacuum cleaners generally avert this, by having the user of the regular vacuum cleaner actually use it correctly (although the people using the Dyson do a lot of turning to try and hide that Dysons don't work as well in straight lines), but they do like to advertise how easy it is to put away their product as it lacks a cord, by showing a woman pulling a vacuum cleaner's long cord towards her like she's trying to pull a tree stump behind her… completely ignoring the fact that most vacuum cleaners with cords have a convenient big button on them that automatically pulls the cord back in within seconds.
  • There's a product called "Easy Feet". Apparently, now bending over to wash your feet is a horrifying task even for those lacking a physical problem to impair movement. The problem with the ad is that it is really uneven; half of the testimonials are marketing it as a spa product (it massages as it cleans and pumices calluses away), and the others market it as a convenience product (for those who have trouble bending over, like the handicapped or overweight). The testimonials kind of blend and just make it sound like everybody is too damn lazy to lean over. Also, they misspelled "heels".
  • The Cracked article quoted on the main page gives us the Easy Toothbrush, "an ordinary toothbrush with bristles organized so as to form a rounded surface, making it similar to several dozen toothbrushes you can buy at the grocery store." It features a woman who has apparently never used a toothbrush before in her life, as even incidental bristle contact causes her to recoil in pain as if she had been brushing with a steak knife. Cracked apparently found this one particularly reprehensible: for everything else in the article, there's a section giving a quick description of what they're trying to sell, a "hyperbole" section discussing the contents (and the obviously-faked incompetence) of the commercial, and then a "reality" section discussing in greater detail the lies and fakery behind the concept - but not for this product, where the reality is simply that "it's a fucking toothbrush".
  • "Eggies" egg boiling cups are designed to avoid the immense challenge presented by peeling hard-boiled eggs. Cut to a woman who's somehow removed half an inch of egg white from every egg she's peeled. The eggs look like Manuel Noriega's skin. The Kevin and Bean Show on KROQ spent several segments discussing the product and found that they were surprisingly difficult to assemble and use. And are you tired of peeling hard-boiled eggs all day? Get Eggies and you can be tired of cracking open your eggs and getting the fluid into the Eggies instead. The really funny issue is that frankly the Eggies look harder to use than a typical egg. If you salt the water you boil the eggs in or immerse the cooked egg in cold water, the shell will usually come off in about three or four big pieces. Trying to pour liquid egg goop into the small opening looks like the more likely possibility to make a huge mess — which might explain why halfway through the ad, they start talking up the ability to add seasoning to your egg, and you start wondering why they can't lead off the commercial with the smart idea.
  • The microwaveable egg container "Egg Wave" has a commercial that may have been the inspiration for the trope image. "Fried in all that grease? What a mess!" The incompetent egg cooker uses a pan filled with what must be a gallon of cooking oil, and upon flipping the eggs, creates a massive greasesplosion in the kitchen. Who cooks eggs in that much grease?! Apparently, a thin layer of butter in a non-stick pan is just too much work these days. Also, you can microwave eggs in just about any microwave-safe container, all of which would cost much less than an Egg Wave. To add insult to injury, you can get similar devices for about half the price at many supermarkets, if you must have something like that.
  • Furniture Fix. The guy couldn't even get off the couch without the product - apparently an old couch impedes the use of one's arms during the daunting task of rising from a sitting position. Not to mention the dad in the first scene who is apparently Too Incompetent to Discipline His Kids for jumping on the couch.
  • GEICO features a set of commercials where people "save" money by doing the most ineffective, asinine things possible, all Played for Laughs, as satires of others' commercials: buying a "rescue panther" instead of a security system, creating a homemade amusement park instead of going to one, having a middle school Girl Posse follow you around and harass you for eating unhealthy instead of a diet plan, hosting paintball inside their house instead of paying to have it repainted, and getting your children a wild possum instead of a real pet. This is supposed to show how switching to GEICO will be a "smart" way to save. In addition to being very impractical, most of those proposed ways to save are just as expensive as the "expensive" way to do them, not to mention often dangerous.
  • Commercials for Glade Plug-Ins seem to think that women are too stupid to unplug an air freshener or some other device in order to plug in the device they want to use. Instead, the women wave the cord around with a confused look on their faces, apparently waiting for an open outlet to materialize. The second situation is even more moronic, as the woman is doing this with a room full of kids who want milkshakes and she can't figure out how to unplug the air freshener or the toaster so she can plug in the blender. On the other hand, the ads could also be implying that the women featured aren't that stupid so much as they are indecisive. Of course, anyone who has to have several seconds to think about unplugging either a plug-in air-freshener or an appliance capable of causing an electrical fire if left plugged-in probably isn't working with all the cylinders in the common sense part of their brain firing.
  • This commercial for the "GoGo Pillow", which is a pillow designed to hold digital tablets and smartphones. One of the main selling points of the commercial is that doing things such as e-mailing, watching a movie, traveling, and following a recipe are "real hassles" when done on a smartphone. They depict a woman trying to type out an e-mail on an iPad with two hands while resting it haphazardly on her knees, with more than half of the iPad hanging off in front of her knees. It promptly falls, not because she wasn't holding it right (or at all), but because she didn't have a GoGo Pillow to hold her iPad closer to her thighs. They also depict a woman laying in bed trying to watch a movie on a tablet with a frustrated look on her face. However, the reason she's having difficulty watching her movie seems to have more to do with the fact that she refuses to even pretend to hold it still than her lack of a GoGo Pillow.
  • Some ads for Google Assistant, as seen in front of about 90% of YouTube videos around November 2018, show a series of people attempting to use their devices as cookbooks while they themselves are cooking in scenes of pure chaos. From a woman who's trying to selfie-cam while holding a live lobster in the other hand, to a mother whose child outright steals her phone while she's left it set in the corner to read from, to a guy having his phone tossed at him while his hands are in a sink full of water or several people trying to hold their phones in one hand while pouring ingredients and inevitably spilling either those ingredients everywhere or their phone into the mix. Then they show someone having a recipe being read to them by Google Assistant — in an otherwise empty kitchen with no distractions whatsoever. What problem is this solving, exactly?
  • If you can't get a grip on your pickle jar, open a bottle of champagne, or pull a weedwhacker cord, you need a Handjob (in no way affiliated with what it sounds like, though the innuendo is clearly intentional). And apart from the fact that it shows grown men being incapable of removing the radiator cap from their car... it's real. It's an actual commercial for a real thing.
    Commenter: This advert is actually genius because I swear I'm thinking about getting a Handjob just to find out if the people who make it actually exist.
  • The ads that simply tell you to "not raise your heating bill" to get comfortable and warm, including:
    • The Snuggie. Explained above.
    • The ad for Handy Heater presents a woman fiddling with a blanket and sweater in a hopeless attempt to warm up. Too incompetent to operate a sweater?
    • The same production company that made the Handy Heater commercial operates the same introduction with the Olde Amish Heater. It seems like these two are friends.
    • Even better with the Huggle hoodie, which is an essential copy from the Snuggie blankets. Yep, even that amount of blankets won't save you time and effort.
  • Yep, the production company (Blue Moon Studios) that made these four commercials above mostly uses the same woman to advertise how clumsy she is, and it's easy to name most of her appearances:
    • The infomercial for the unfortunately named Happy Sack begins with the shot of her struggling to perch her cellphone on top of a table and a lamp's surface. She seems too incompetent to just leave the phone on the table. The Happy Sack somehow allows her not to flip out and just take the phone. She doesn't need a $20 bean bag, she just needs to get up from the couch.
    • The Covermate commercial shows her yet again in an epic struggle with a roll of cling wrap. It then shows her pawing through a box full of lids for the "right" one — but watch carefully: the lid she eventually angrily rejects actually fits the container she's trying to cover. Granted, plastic containers and their lids can warp after time, giving it a small grain of truth, but that doesn't make the commercial any less silly. Also, cling wrap can be notoriously frustrating to unroll, but that's a whole different product idea.
    • The infomercial for WrapMagic shows her second attempt at struggling to use cling/plastic wrap properly. At least she didn't need to deal with the lid/container mixup.
    • She goes out with her shoulder-strapped bag in Strap Magic, but it all goes awry when she has to carry a cup of coffee. You better blame it on the poor quality of the handbag.
    • Drinking coffee (from Brew in 2) is good enough, but she apparently doesn't appreciate buying "4 dollars" for one coffee cup. The announcer even gets fed up with her, saying "That's ridiculous!"
    • Speaking of handling spice bottles, here's Swivel Store, where she just can't be quick on her feet checking all of those bottles.
    • In Power Pod, she throws an outburst with her phone not being able to respond after her phone dies.
    • Handy Valet shows her struggle to operate a foldable table and how to get comfort because her stuff is around the house. The man struggling with the tray is much better, though.
    • And if you wanted her name, it's supposedly "Stewart" from the Block Box commercial. But in reality, her fed-up nature towards telemarketers speaks similarly to most people.
  • And speaking of "Too Incompetent to Operate Soap", behold: Soap Magic! (and yep, the same woman from the examples above)
    • Today, these automatic soap pumps are sold with commercials that claim that people don't want to touch a germy pump. You know, the same pump that is filling your other hand with anti-bacterial soap.
    • There is one useful purpose to Soap Magic and similar battery-powered dispensers: if you need to wash your hands, but they're covered in something you need to wash off first before touching anything else, such as after prepping raw foods like poultry, beef, or pork. Of course, the ads for Soap Magic completely fail to bring this up, instead taking the "too incompetent to handle a bar or pump bottle of soap" route. And that's before we get into mentioning negative reviews of the pump, citing its habits such as burning through batteries, clogging, requiring multiple hand waves over the sensor to get it to pump enough soap, and other problems of inconvenience.
  • A trend in mobile game ads since about 2019 is to show gameplay (whether real or fabricated) where the player botches up very simple puzzles that often share minimal relation with the game in question, usually plastering a giant "FAIL" caption over the screen when they screw up, with the intent to goad and entice those who know they can do better into downloading the game. Some of the earlier examples are several mobile commercials for Homescapes; captioned with titles such as "Why is this game so hard?", these ads show the player attempting to fix rooms with headache-inducing methods such as using a hammer on a broken aquarium window or trying to extinguish a fire with oil. It's not helped that the actual game is a match-three game that has nothing to do with repairing items.
  • "Juicero: Making Juice is Easy" tries to convince you that the old way of juicing at home is hopelessly difficult. Our protagonists start off spending $50 on vegetables and carrying them all in their hands because they forgot their tote bags and couldn't find any to buy. Then the guy tries in vain to peel a carrot with a peeler he claims is broken. Then he digs up his juicer from the forgotten depths of his cupboard, which is followed by a search through the entire kitchen for the missing part. When he does find it, he lifts it up in celebration and has something fall out of it. He's barely able to assemble the machine and keep it from falling apart for long enough to make a glass of juice for both of them. Somehow it ends up tasting horrible even though they used high-quality ingredients and were able to create the blend they wanted. In the end, it's revealed that the whole ordeal of washing the veggies and cutting them up somehow made a huge mess in the kitchen, and the ad concludes that making juice is actually "a huge pain" as the guy accidentally cuts himself while attempting to clean the dishes that materialized out of the ether. These people may have made one prior attempt with their old juicer before shoving it into the cupboard and forgetting about it. Juicero still expects them to be so passionate about fine juice that they willingly drop $400 (originally $700) on a juicer and $5 to $7 per juice packet — aka glass of juice — on top of that. Oh, and the juice packets could easily be squeezed by hand. The main feature of the wifi-connected machine was largely used to check the DRM on the juice packets, which expired after 7 days and bricked the device outright if you tried to use a packet that was out of date, as well as to collect user data for Google to sell.
  • The Jump Snap is a jump rope... but without the rope. According to the commercial, more people don't jump rope because it's too hard. It acts as if jumping rope takes a lot of skill and coordination. Apparently these people were so sheltered as children that they did not jump rope on the playground at recess. Later in the ad it claims that you only need to bend your knees. Repeat: This is a jump rope, without the rope, and you don't need to jump. Let that sink in. Even if you have mobility issues, there are options for low-impact cardio that don't make you look like an idiot.
    • Parodied in Splatoon 2 with Off the Hook's comments on the stage Mako Mart.
      Pearl: "Look, Pearl! There's a sale on cordless jump ropes! I'm gonna buy 'em all!"
      Marina: It seemed like a good idea at the time!
  • The Billy Mays ad for the Jupiter Jack shows a lady struggling to talk on the phone while driving. She struggles to hold it up to her ear with her shoulder, and drops it so hard that it slides all the way across the car. Apart from looking like an idiot, making phone calls while driving (or doing anything other than driving while driving) is heavily frowned upon and even illegal in some countries - granted, this is exactly what the Jupiter Jack is supposed to help with, being a hands-free device to talk to people over the phone without ever having to take your eyes off the road.
  • Lasik radio ads star people too incompetent to wear glasses.
  • From the Cracked.com page, the companion to the L'il Reminder is the Listen Up, "a hearing aid for people who can't admit they need a hearing aid", which spends most of its commercial time exaggerating or straight-up lying about its capabilities.
    "The false advertising is blatant. For example, the guy at the football game can apparently hear the quarterback call plays in the huddle from the stands. Unless the Listen Up is capable of some fancy Fourier analysis for isolating specific sounds, and you can be sure that it is not, then he would bleed from the ears due to amplified crowd noise before ever hearing a single call. The only reason his ears aren't bleeding is because, as the customer reviews can tell you, the piece of crap doesn't work."
    • Brian Regan made fun of the product by pointing out how in the ad, someone using the Listen Up overhears two other women enviously discussing how good she looks. As he then proceeds to point out, people generally don't whisper compliments behind your back, implying that what you would actually hear would be vicious, friendship-ending insults.
  • Little Caesar's pizza has several commercials advertising their Hot N Ready pizzas as "an alternative to the frustration of ordering online", which include such things as a guy who punched through the screens of two laptops (one for each hand) and still has them on his wrists and a committee who can't figure out how to navigate a pizza restaurant's website. One family even went "off the grid" because of the hassle of ordering pizza online (with the father making the announcement in the most obnoxious voice possible).
  • The MagneScribe pen. Among its suspicious-at-best claims, it boasts that it eliminates the hassle of capping normal pens (cheating by using a cap that's too chewed to be usable). It also talks of the hassle of dropping your pen and having it roll under the couch — complete with shots of an actress mindlessly flailing about underneath the couch, displaying the eyesight of a mole and the arm span of a T. rex — without ever explaining how, precisely, the MagneScribe is supposed to be immune to being dropped and rolling away from you once it's detached from the magic pendant. Perhaps the weirdest part, however, is near the end of the commercial when another lady is seen writing down an order for her first MagneScribe pen, with a MagneScribe pen. Apparently, once you've bought a MagneScribe, it will magically return to you from wherever it is, even through time and space.
    • This product was also featured in the Cracked article linked on the main page, and, as the article points out, you could buy yourself 300 regular pens for the $30 that the MagneScribe pen costs.
  • The commercial for the My Li'l Reminder starts off with a clip of someone's senile grandma lost in a parking lot, trying to find her car. Not only does she seem to lack her memory, but also basic problem-solving skills to figure out where her car might be. But have no fear, thanks to the My Li'l Reminder, she is now able to remember where her car is and start driving again... so long as she doesn't go on to forget that she's driving.
    • That is, of course, if the product even works. Several consumer comments have complained that the play-back is so garbled and faint that they nearly have to shove it in their ear to be able to hear anything. This may be why the thing is also advertised as "unobtrusive" and something that "won't bother the people sitting around you".
    • So, if people with memory problems remember that they have a Li'l Reminder…
    • One of its suggested uses is to put it on the fridge and use it as a message center. As this YouTuber points out, it's not hard for the tech-unsavvy or the inattentive to accidentally record over the single message it can hold, replacing it with blank or white noise, or what if someone comes along to record a new message and doesn't bother to check for an existing message first? Only one message can be held on the device at a time, which means if you only have one of these things, you'll only be able to post one audio message on the fridge at a time. At this point, you might as well just use sticky notes.
  • In another case of burying the lede, the No Spill Chill, which looks pretty good for when freezer space is at a premium, but instead wastes most of its time waving ice cube trays around.
  • Used in the 'no to AV' UK campaign of 2011, showing students being utterly confused by the concept (2:00 onwards), despite it being only marginally more complicated than the current system. Particularly apt that it's being taught to under-18s, who would be unable to vote. In addition, many of the arguments put forward are so vague and generalized they could be made against any voting system, mixing this in with shades of Hobbes Was Right as well.
  • These ads for the Ove-Glove begin with a woman who drops something, supposedly because she's using one of those old-fashioned oven mitts, but anyone who's ever used an oven can see that she "dropped" the thing because she only used one hand. The commercial is trying to imply that she could have held the item securely with a single hand if she'd only been wearing the Ove-Glove, but two normal mitts cost less than a single Ove-Glove. Meanwhile, the fakery extends in the other direction as a woman effortlessly moves hot cookies using her new Ove-Glove, and then one of her children immediately picks up one of the "hot" cookies bare-handed and takes a bite. The Ove-Glove apparently protects so well against hot surfaces that its very touch will instantly absorb the excess heat from your cookies and allow them to be immediately consumed without burning off the person's taste buds.
  • The Perfect Brownie pan commercial opens with a woman who can't seem to use a spatula when trying to remove what one can only imagine must be cement brownies from a pan. She has apparently never heard of "greasing the pan" or lining brownie pans and cake tins with greaseproof paper, both of which are significantly easier and cheaper.
  • Perfect Pancake. The TV ad begins with a black-and-white film of somebody trying and failing to flip a pancake in spectacular fashion, an aim that is so atrocious that you might wonder, "do they also miss the bowl while pouring their morning cereal?"
  • Parakeets are great to have around the house, but do you get tired of taking a few minutes out of your daily routine to care for it and spending about $10 every two weeks or so on new supplies? Introducing what surely must be the lowest (but probably the most hilarious) point of this trope, the Perfect Polly Pet! note 
  • Pillsbury Toaster Strudel Bagel version had a voice over showing how unbelievably hard it was to prepare a real bagel... by showing a woman trying to cram one into a single slot of an upright toaster. The narrator then tells us how adding cream cheese and strawberry jam made things even worse, especially if you put it on the bagel beforehand and again try to put it in one slot.
  • An advertisement for the Pocket Chair includes a woman becoming frustrated with the "complicated devices" of a standard folding chair and throwing it to the ground in anger. This can be Truth in Television with worn-out or rusted chairs (or ladders or pretty much anything that folds in such a manner), but it's still over the top. Even more ridiculous, the suggestion to have a "Pocket Chair party", showing a family sitting at a table inside their house playing cards. Not to mention, as pointed out by MikeJ, some shots even showed perfectly empty benches in the background.
  • The Brazilian Polishop is infamous when it comes to this trope. We got people who can't use a toothbrush, to people who can't peel a fruit without somehow throwing the fruit through the nearest window, to people who can't put a dish over a common table.
  • The Potato Doctor, which promises to eliminate the hassle of slicing open a baked potato, plopping a pat of butter or a spoonful of butter or margarine into it, and shaking salt and pepper on top of it. Instead, you have to mix your seasonings together, inject it into the potato, and "scramble" it. Anybody who knows how to use silverware would have no need for this product.
  • One Powerjet commercial features a man who flies into a psychotic rage (stalking around like a cornered animal, clawing at his pockets for quarters, and lashing out at nearby equipment) at the fact that his self-serve car wash was cut short by the timer, rather than just putting in more quarters. Sure, he could be out of quarters, but since most self-service car washes have change machines for this exact purpose, it makes it appear that the guy is far too prone to violence to be driving. This was mentioned in that Cracked article, too, where the commercial seems to forget about that part immediately while demonstrating how it works. To quote:
    The problem that they are setting up for their product to solve seems to be emotional instability, not dirty cars. The novelty of the Powerjet is supposed to be the little compartment for adding soap. Soap wasn't car wash guy's problem. In fact, based on what we know about him so far, giving him more soap would risk driving him to psychosis and murder. A subsequent dramatic collapse onto whatever happens to be available at the time is quite possible, and even likely.
  • This showed up in an old ad for Ring Pops, of all things. The commercial shows three kids sitting in a movie theater with a bag of Skittles-like candy, a lollipop, and a Ring Pop respectively, and a guy tries to squeeze past them. As the guy squeezes past the first two kids, they freak out and their candy goes flying. The third kid likewise flails about, but keeps his Ring Pop thanks to wearing it on his hand. Problem? The guy barely bumps the boy with the Skittles Expy, and doesn't even appear to bump the girl with the lolly, and yet they lose their candy like someone greased their hands. Even the kid with the Ring Pop spends the second or so where the guy is in front of him flailing his arms all over the place as if he's trying to work his Ring Pop loose from his finger. These kids didn't need to have gotten Ring Pops instead, they simply needed to not completely lose their shit and throw their candy everywhere when another human being passed in front of them.
  • As seen elsewhere on this page, advertisers think that cooking eggs is an immensely difficult task beyond the capabilities of normal people. Enter the Rollie Eggmaster! This begins with a woman who cannot cook eggs without making a gargantuan mess and leaving eggshells everywhere. In comes the Eggmaster into which you pour the eggs (now competently cracked) and a few minutes later, you pull out what is essentially an egg on a stick (and it doesn't look particularly appealing.) This is also much easier to eat than an ordinary fried egg! Techmoan gives his take on it here.
  • Although the infomercial for the Ronco Miracle Blade III set features shots of actors doing exactly what you'd expect knives to do, like cutting a turkey, the first shot shows an actress stabbing a tomato with an inappropriate knife and apparently hitting the artery.
    • This was the final product in that Cracked article, and they point out that Ronco can't even do the "too incompetent" part right. The very next shot after the tomato one features a man carving a turkey perfectly — but, because he isn't using the Miracle Blade to do so, this counts as "destroying" it.
    • Ronco generally made adverts like they were being paid to represent this trope. Each one featured a busy housewife with a look of long-suffering frustration as she failed to perform some task that we've done for decades — cut paper, peel vegetables, sharpen a pencil etc. Then she is given the Ronco plastic-tat-o-matic and seen smilingly performing the formerly impossible tasks. Don't forget the Ronco plastic-tat-o-matic is Not Available in Stores.
  • The Shoe-dini commercials take this trope possibly as far as it can go; the ad shows people trying and failing spectacularly to put on slip-on shoes; in other words, they're unsuccessfully trying to put on shoes that require absolutely no physical effort to put on, besides moving your feet. They seem to be trying to force the shoes onto their feet without stretching the hole whatsoever; sure enough, the Shoe-dini is designed to stretch the shoe's hole, and said people have absolutely no problem using it. While the Shoe-dini clearly has a specific target audience in mind, mainly elderly people who have limited mobility issues due to chronic back and arthritis pain, the commercial just comes off as insulting. Up until April 2010-ish the slogan for Shoe-dini was "It's not just a shoe horn, it's a shoe horn on a stick!" Apparently they only in hindsight realized just how clearly this shed light on their shoe-based incompetency presented in the ad (a great deal of shoe horns are on sticks already). It has since been changed to "It's not just a shoe horn, it's Shoe-dini!"
  • The ads for the "Slob Stopper". It's apparently a bib for adults. The commercial opens with a smiling man in a parked car pouring coffee all over himself, while the voiceover says, "Has this ever happened to you?" The ad goes on the show him wearing the product, then doing it again, sitting in the same parked car, apparently ogling a passing runner. And he never stops smiling. Okay, if you have enough of a problem with drinking in a stopped car, you probably need more than a bib. And he apparently never heard of tucking a napkin into your shirt collar.
    • Also note how in the before shot, he pours the entire contents of the cup on himself, but in the after shot, no doubt due to the magic of the slob stopper, he only spills a tiny amount.
    • World's Dumbest... showcases another driving bib called the Drib, in which the guy is simply too incompetent to eat, period: first, without the Drib, he tries to jam the hot dog into his mouth and fails, pretty much looking like an idiot. With the Drib, he's even worse, flipping it vertical and hitting his Drib-covered chest with the hotdog. Being too incompetent to operate a blanket is one thing; lacking the basic hand-eye coordination of a newborn child is another. And just like with the slop stopper, the guy who's incapable of feeding himself is driving a car.
  • A commercial for "Slushie Magic" (a product that makes "instant" slushies by shaking a cup filled with juice and a frozen plastic cube) shows the typical shot of someone turning on a blender before the lid is put on. Ya know, something people learn not to do very quickly.
    • It gets funnier shortly afterwards. After turning on the blender and the liquid starts going everywhere, the blender's operator then decides to try to put the lid on. This person clearly shouldn't be left alone.
  • One SodaStream ad complains that carrying bottles of carbonated water is inconvenient, and illustrates it with a clip of someone too incompetent not to put their (somewhat heavy) water bottles in a crappy thin plastic bag that unsurprisingly breaks.
  • The Star Shower Motion Laser Light is supposed to be an "easy" solution to the hassle of decorating the outside of the house at Christmas time, but the ad shows a man pulling an extra-large sphere of regular string Christmas lights from a box that have been tangled together. Anybody that knows the proper way to put away Christmas lights at the end of the season never has a problem with tangled lights come next Christmas. Also, the ad show a man reaching dangerously beyond his ladder trying to decorate his house with regular string lights by simply throwing them over, and almost into, the gutter. Maybe it's better if that guy does not try climbing a ladder for any reason. Oh, and the guy didn't bother to check that the lights worked before hanging them up (spoiler: they didn't work).
  • A minor example: An ad for Swiffer dusters shows a person using an ordinary feather duster... by pounding it up and down on various surfaces, kicking up an unbelievable cloud of dust. Has any one in history used a feather duster in this fashion? Mr. Monk would not be pleased.
  • As mentioned in the Cracked article, one of the worst offenders is the Tiddy Bear, a little bear-shaped piece of fabric you wrap around a seat belt to prevent chafing. While the product itself might have merit, one woman in the commercial says her seat belt makes it difficult to breathe. This girl doesn't need a Tiddy Bear, she needs a ribcage. Or to stop driving around in a red 1958 Plymouth Fury. And, of course, they had to give it a name guaranteed to make people giggle. This was also featured on the aforementioned World's Dumbest..., where Chuck Nice summed it up best:
    "Best thing about the Tiddy Bear? The name!"
  • The "Total Transformation Program", a "child behavior modification program" advertised on this very Wiki, seems to be aimed at parents who aren't dealing very well with what sound like perfectly normal kids. "Have you tried screaming, punishing, pleading, and negotiating and your child still walks all over you?" Modern science has answers. The program really is meant for parents who are just that bad at working with normal teenagers... Since the "Trick" of the product is that the "Total transformation" is of the parent, not of the kid. This does, of course, sound very much like a sinister Assimilation Plot. Even worse since the commercial acts as if your kids doing things like "yelling, backtalking, and lying" are abnormal, a sign of them going down a horribly wrong path. While these certainly aren't desirable behaviors, they are also, typically, completely normal for a teenager — in fact, their absence might be a greater sign of them having a problem.
  • Touch & Brush, in which people point toothpaste tubes at toothbrushes, squash the tubes like they're trying to make pythons choke up the rabbits they ate last week (creating horrific pasty messes in the process), then use completely ineffective methods to get the remnants out of the tube. Who taught these children how toothpaste works? (Like many other examples, the machine was originally designed with amputees and people who have serious joint problems in mind, but the attempt to market it to a wider audience has resulted in this trope.)
  • There's something out there called the Uro Club. It's basically a golf club with a built in storage tank for you to urinate into if you are the kind of person who is unable to hold your bladder in until the 18th hole (or until one of the bathrooms/porta-potties that are usual on golf courses, or just find a bush). Though it has a towel as well to be discretionary, it doesn't look at all that discreet, especially when they put in a shot of three people apparently "using" the clubs and insisting on standing right next to each other. And right next to a bush, at that. Hilariously, they don't make any mention of how being hollow and occasionally filled with liquid affects the club's performance as a club, but they do show it being used as one. You would think finding a damn bathroom would be easier than explaining to your friends why your club broke and showered them with piss.
  • More like indecisiveness rather than incompetence, but one Verizon HTC 8X phone ad involves showing off how simple the menu is and how easy it is to do things quickly on the phone. It precedes this by showing a man struggling to operate a microwave oven and taking so long to punch in his house alarm code that it starts going off. If you can't work a microwave, you don't need a cellphone.
  • The Wax Vac, a sort of wetvac for one's ear canal, is a Zigzagging of the trope. The "cheaper, easier way everyone already does" (IE, swab 'em out with a Q-tip) is one that's specifically warned against (there's a warning label on every box and people are advised not to insert anything smaller than their own pinkie finger into their ear canals), and it is rather easy to poke your eardrums with one if you're not careful — which does indeed hurt like crazy. However, sticking what amounts to a pistol-shaped vacuum cleaner in there may be just as harmful, and the actor hired barely inserts the Q-tip before screaming at the top of his lungs in the most unintentionally hilarious way possible.
  • Ads for the Windows smartphone boast how quickly and easily you can access their features. They compare this by showing us some blundering fools messing around with their phones at the worst possible moments, like while coaching a kids' baseball game or dancing with a woman at a club. If you're this kind of person, you'd likely be having more problems besides what phone you're using.
  • An ad for the Wonder File insists that it's impossible to organise your papers, demonstrated by a woman randomly shifting papers about on a desk. It doesn't mention that organisational skills will not be improved by a change in method, but a change in attitude — and of course if you changed your attitude to organising you probably wouldn't need the Wonder File.
  • There are ads targeted towards children and parents for Zip-It Bedding, a product similar to a sleeping bag for regular beds that replaces the old sheet/blanket method… because apparently, making beds is an impossibly hard task for parents. In the ad, they portray both parents and children as being, well… the trope name sums it up nicely.
  • An ad for EZ Cracker, an egg separator begins by showing the ridiculous difficulty of cracking open an egg without sending the contents everywhere, a skill most folks master by their third egg. The ad also has a woman biting down on a large piece of eggshell in her muffin, something easily picked out of any badly-cracked egg. A piece of eggshell too small to see during the mixing process will usually dissolve during baking, especially in acidic muffin batter. The product was meant for people with arthritis. For the rest of us, the act of shoving an egg into a receptacle is much more time consuming than just cracking it. They also throw in a device that scrambles the egg in the shell, for people who find scrambling an egg in a bowl with a fork too much of a hassle.
  • Dropout shows several real products, like the wine purse, which is for those who apparently can't hold a wine glass, or the twirling spaghetti fork, which makes you wonder why someone wouldn't just use a spoon.
  • The Turbo Pump is a pump for people too incompetent to pour liquids. One of their examples is a man trying to refill his windshield wiper fluid by upending the jug and pouring it all over his engine. While it does offer legitimate uses such as emptying a hot tub or dealing with a clogged drain, most of the demonstrations are, as Cr1TiKaL put it, people too stupid to understand gravity.
  • An ad for Dixie Ultra-Strong disposable paper plates shows a side-by-side comparison of that plate and a more traditional Styrofoam plate side-by-side, both over-piled with food when the Styrofoam plate bends under the weight of all the food and all the food collapses off. The only reason the other plate collapsed is because the person was holding it at an angle and only by the edge of the plate, vs the person holding the Dixie plate correctly.
  • In Package Shark, we see a woman, in an attempt to open plastic packaging, employing a chainsaw. The product in question was a clamshell package opener, which came in a clamshell package. Oh, the irony... (For the record, a decent pair of scissors will work just as well, and they can be found anywhere for much less money.)
  • This commercial for Toucan, a hands-free can opener, goes out of its way to make using a regular can opener look like a horrific act of torture. It even says that cans spill when you try to open cans the normal way, ignoring the fact that it looks like it was deliberately tipped over. Also only the can is in color for some reason.
  • The Couch Commander depicts a typical suburban family sitting down to watch television when the siblings fight for the remote and everyone spills their snacks and drinks (all set to the theme song of The Beverly Hillbillies), a crisis that could've been averted with the Couch Commander, a cup and remote holder that slides in between the sofa cushions, ignoring the fact that the family's little squabble would've also tipped over the Couch Commander anyway (or at the very least knocked the drinks out of the cupholder). Why they didn't simply place their food and drink on the coffee table right in front of them is anyone's guess.
    • In addition, the commercial doesn't seem to know what a home theater is, as it advertises that you can use this product to "turn your couch into a home theater!" A home theater typically describes a big screen TV with surround sound speakers, not a chair with a cup holder. Some home theater owners do invest in those, but to say adding cupholders to your couch turns your living room into a home theater is like saying you can turn your crappy Dell computer into a high-end gaming PC simply by adding a gaming chair.
  • The RoboStir. Who cooks multiple soups and sauces at the same time, stirring constantly for hours? If you're one of those people, this product is for you (if only the thing actually worked). Unless you're caramelizing onionsnote , most slow-cooked foods prepared on a stove only need to be stirred occasionally, so nothing's going to burn as long as you check on it and stir every now and then. And most sauces only need 30 minutes to cook, sometimes longer if you're making spaghetti sauce, but who is making a large pot of spaghetti sauce to serve with soup?
  • Are you too incompetent to operate a fork? Then you need the Grab-A-Bite!
  • The ID Police, a fancy ink roller that you use to "encrypt" (i.e. block out with ink) sensitive information for folks who have never heard of a paper shredder. Even if you don't own a paper shredder, you can easily accomplish the same task this $10 ink roller performs with a $1 Sharpie.

Product Unnamed:

  • A commercial for a mosquito repellent candle shows a group of friends trying to use a single tiki-torch-style mosquito repellent, huddled around it desperate for protection! Naturally, they use dozens of the advertised brand to protect their party.
  • An ad for a device to unclog plumbing first shows a person trying to use a plumber's snake by repeatedly ramming it into the sink as though trying to stab the poor sink to death with it.
  • The commercial for a cordless soldering iron, which shows a man struggling to reach his project with a corded soldering iron, tugging futilely on the cord. He seems oblivious to the five feet of empty, perfectly-usable workbench space between the outlet the tool is plugged into and the project he's attempting to work on, or he's never heard of an extension cord.
  • The ads for those little rubber caulk spreader thingies usually show someone who doesn't have their product using their finger to spread caulk, because they apparently have no cardboard or tools of any kind. Additionally, the caulk already looks like it was applied by a pack of kindergartners offered a $500 prize to the one who could apply the most caulk to the bathroom tiles. Most caulk is in fact supposed to be smoothed out by finger. Even if you don't want to get your hands dirty, you can always use a latex glove.
  • The containers that store inside each other. The commercial shows a woman trying to get a container out of a cabinet and ends up pulling them all down... well, she pulls two down and ends up violently pulling the rest down. She doesn't need new containers, she needs help.
  • There's a commercial for a set of kitchen containers in which you can use each container as a lid to hold more food. Of course, you have to show that you just don't have enough room in a regular flat-lid container. So they show a woman trying to put spaghetti into a normal container. She has, in complete knowledge that there is not enough room in the container, piled on about a quarter of the container's volume of spaghetti on top of the completely full container, and then acts surprised when it goes everywhere when she puts the flat lid on.
  • An advertisement exists for a brownie sorter or a giant cupcake-cake maker that is treated by the family as something as revolutionary as a cure for cancer, with the old baking trinkets so monotonous and boring they put the entire family to sleep. Also, at one point a group of kids try to share one cupcake. Somehow, they failed logistics class.
  • A commercial featured a man sitting in a pile of twist ties. Only his head and hands were visible, he actually proclaimed "I'm drowning in twist ties!" He needs to remember to stand up.
  • There's this commercial for a computer-fixing company that shows a guy clicking his mouse hard for a few seconds before screaming "SON OF A-" and smashing his laptop to bits. Admittedly, anyone who works computer tech support will confirm this to be Truth in Television.
  • This advert for a cycle computer shows a rival being utterly flummoxed by a Brand X computer, which doesn't have a touchscreen involved. Bear in mind, most of these computers are operated by one button (with two or three more for configuration, which you can forget about after installing it).
  • This Australian commercial for a microwave cookbook shows a woman pounding at a digital microwave display in frustration.
  • The Game Show Network had a series of PSA commercials trying to instruct people how to use a microwave oven without giving themselves food poisoning. Yes, really, food poisoning.
  • An ad for shelves shows a woman trying to grab a jar of peanut butter out of her cupboard, only to flail around like a wacky waving inflatable arm-flailing tube man as it falls to the floor before giving the camera a "what the hell" look like the viewer made her drop it.
  • An animated ad for a lock re-keying tool demonstrates its ease of use and how fast it is by comparing it to changing a lightbulb. They might have a point if this was something like a timed race under fair conditions, but apparently the guy changing the lightbulb only just turned it off because he spends most of the process recoiling in pain from the hot bulb and then juggling it in a vain effort to keep it from falling and breaking, and then screws in the new bulb.

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