Something better to do

A representative of Life Miracle, the manufacturer of the Magnetic Laundry System about which I wrote several days ago, responded to my article here.  Here is my response:

I just want to comment here, as I represent the manufacturer of this product. I COMPLETELY disagree with Jonathan’s assessment of the product itself,

It should come as no surprise to anyone that the manufacturer of the product disagrees with my statement that it is useless.

There are three possible scenarios here:

1. The product works.
2. The product doesn’t work and yet Judy actually believes that it does.
3. The product doesn’t work, Judy knows it doesn’t work, and yet she is still trying to convince people that it works.

Everything written on Life Miracle’s Web site, and everything Judy has written on behalf of Life Miracle in email to me and in the comment above, would be the same regardless of which of these scenarios is true.

The only thing missing is the one thing which Life Miracle could publish only if the product actually works: the results of rigorous laboratory tests showing that clothes washed with the magnets end up cleaner than clothes washed in nothing but water.

Here’s the fascinating thing: Life Miracle had an outside laboratory do such tests over ten years ago. The laboratory washed identically stained clothes without detergent, both with and without the Magnetic Laundry System, and then measured how much cleaner they were. On Life Miracle’s Web site, it has published the results of the laundry run with the magnets, but the results of the laundry run in which only water was used are omitted. The only conceivable explanation for why Life Miracle would fail to publish these results is because they show that water alone gets clothes just as clean as water plus magnets.

If that’s not, in fact, what is shown by the unreleased results, then I encourage Life Miracle to publish these results and let everyone see the independent laboratory confirmation that magnets clean clothes better than water alone.

Washing clothes with less detergent is a good idea. In some cases, even washing clothes with no detergent is a good idea. But people don’t need this product to use less or no detergent. All they need is the knowledge that they don’t need to use as much detergent to get their clothes clean.

Here are some additional questions that people might consider when evaluating whether this product actually does anything:

1. Consumers buy over $3 billion worth of laundry-detergent products per year. The Magnetic Laundry System has been on the market for eight years, and the manufacturer claims that it makes most of those billions of dollars worth of detergent obsolete. Nevertheless, its sales even today are miniscule. Is that plausible if it really works?
2. Over eleven years after the first patent behind this product was filed, there isn’t a single washing-machine manufacturer in the entire world selling a machine which uses this technology to clean clothes. Is that plausible if it really works?

the vast majority of our customers would disagree with him as well.

The vast majority of Bernie Madoff’s clients thought he was the cat’s meow.

The vast majority of patients treated with leeches and suction cups in the middle ages thought the treatments were effective.

The vast majority of people who bought the tonics sold by con men on the American frontier believed they had curative powers.

You can fool some of the people all of the time, and you can fool all of the people some of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time. It doesn’t matter how many people have been hoodwinked if there is no objective scientific evidence that the product works.

Not to mention the fact that we have no way of knowing how many customers have purchased the product or how many of them are satisfied with it, since Life Miracle has not published those statistics and I assume they have no intention of doing so.

This is the first time in eight years a customer has so virulently attacked this amazing product.

I guess you’ve been pretty lucky, then.

http://web.archive.org/web/19990428054924/www.optc.com/~btoback/laundrystuff.html
http://www.mother-ease.com/wwwboard/messages/Default.asp/sub/show/action/posts/fid/1/tid/11086
http://www.post1.net/lowem/entry/balls_to_you_too
http://www.rathinker.co.kr/skeptic/refuge/laundry.html
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/944/do-laundry-balls-really-work
http://weeklywire.com/ww/12-08-97/nash_ol-helter_shelter-original.html
http://www.choice.com.au/viewArticle.aspx?id=105458&catId=100285&tid=100008
http://www.chem1.com/CQ/magscams.html#MLA
http://sniggle.net/Laundry/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laundry_ball
http://perchance-to-dream.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!831B7AF66C9D1F6C!137.entry
http://www.care2.com/c2c/groups/disc.html?gpp=41&pst=1155172
http://rc.bipc.org/fanni/maghale/5-Int’l.%20Studies/FDA%20Report%20on%20Pseduscience%20Technologies.pdf
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20070719191503AA9DQyK
http://www.skepticfriends.org/forum/showquestion.asp?faq=2&fldAuto=25
http://www.keytlaw.com/FTC/Cases/071.htm
http://www.jonstarbuck.co.uk/archives/121
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20026852.700-water-washes-whitish.html

(That’s not even a complete list.) Some of these deal specifically with the Life Miracle Magnetic Laundry System and other magnetic laundry products, some of them deal specifically with the classic TradeNet “laundry balls” scam and products like them, and some of them deal with both. All are relevant, because Life Miracle is using exactly the same strategies for marketing its product as all the other laundry scams have used in the past (claims to revolutionary technology, reliance on anecdotal evidence, environmentalist appeal, etc.), and like the perpetrators of all those other scams, Life Miracle has offered no objective evidence that its product works.

We are a very small company, and our sincere goal is to do as much good to help people and the environment as we possibly can.

Unless you are a non-profit, your sincere goal is to make money.

If you don’t like our product, fine. But please don’t make personal attacks on our character and make terrible assumptions about our intentions. That is just wrong.

It is laughable that you accuse me of making personal attacks, when it was you who made this personal in your private emails to me. You appealed to things that you and I supposedly have in common, things which are completely irrelevant to the question of whether your product works, in an effort to garner sympathy. Then, when it became clear that it was not going to work, you got nasty and suggested that I must have been paid off by a laundry detergent company to post my blog entry about your product.

As I told you in email, Judy, I do not believe in posting people’s private email without their permission. But that rule goes out the window when they make false accusations against me which their private emails disprove or say things in public which contradict things they said to me in private. Continue down this path, and you will find your emails to me published on this blog for all to see, and I assure you, it won’t be pretty. Please consider this fair warning.

It is difficult not to make “terrible assumptions about [your] intentions” after examining the scientifically absurd claims you make about your product; noting your failure to provide any objective scientific evidence that it works; noting your hiding of objective scientific evidence in your possession related to the question of whether it works; and noting that when asked for objective evidence that it works, you start talking about the toxic chemicals in laundry detergents, which, true or not, is completely irrelevant to the question of whether your product actually cleans clothes.

I do not know Jonathan’s motivation to spend such an enormous amount of effort and time to attack a product and a company that is doing our very best to do a little good in the world,

You have no idea how much “effort and time” I have spent on this, nor do you have any idea how much time I would consider “enormous.” I’d venture to say that I’ve spent less time on this than you have.

Having said that, my motivation is that I believe you are ripping people off, and I don’t believe in standing by idly and watching people get ripped off. And it is more than my own personal belief — it is in fact a religious obligation handed down by the Jewish Sages, based on Leviticus 19:16, “You shall not stand idly by the blood of your brother.”

What is within our control is how we treat our customers. We have a number of companies who buy the product from us and retail to the consumer. Jonathan purchased the product through one of our distributors. I cannot confirm the information posted above, but I will nevertheless take his word for it.

If you really wanted to “confirm the information posted above,” you could have asked me, and I could have provided you with copies of the on-line receipt for my order from Powerful Life, my credit-card statements showing when they charged me for shipping the product and for the product itself, the shipping label showing when they actually shipped it, and the USPS delivery confirmation record showing when it arrived at my house.

It seems to me that you would have asked for this proof if (a) you were really unaware of how this distributor was treating customers and (b) you really cared about it.

I am also taking steps to communicate to this distributor so it never happens to another customer. If it does, their ability to sell our product will be jeopardized. Period. Our customers deserve our complete honor and respect.

“I’m shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!” (Casablanca)

Powerful Life is cheating people.

I cannot imagine that you are so naive as to believe that a stern talking-to is going to convince them to stop. Companies that cheat people, keep cheating people… that’s what they do.

Just as the only way you can prove that your product actually works is to provide objective evidence that it cleans better than water alone, the only way you can prove that you actually care how your customers are treated is to sever your relationship with any distributor which is found to be cheating people.

Until Powerful Life is no longer distributing your products, you will remain complicit in their unscrupulous practices.

It is also worth noting that what you wrote above is different than what you told me in private email about how you are handling this issue. When you tell two different stories about how you’re handling the same problem, it is difficult to believe that either is true.

I have apologized to him directly for his alleged experience,

My “alleged” experience? I thought you said you were taking my word for it? Are you taking my word for it, or not? Would you like me to send you all of the proof listed above?

and have offered him a full and complete refund (including shipping costs) from us if he does not receive satisfaction from the reseller. We will do this even though we did not sell it to him or collect the money for this order. According to his written account, Jonathan deserves, and will receive, a full refund. Though it represents a total loss to us, we believe it is absolutely the right thing to do, and the right thing for Jonathan.

I appreciate that, and I assure you that I will take you up on it if the reseller fails to refund all of my money to me.

Perhaps you are sincere in your desire to do the right thing. Perhaps you are, truly, doing this to protect the fine, well-deserved reputation of your company. I would like to believe this.

However, I’m sorry to say that there is another possible explanation. If everyone who complains about your product gets all their money back, then who’s going to be the lead plaintiff in the class-action lawsuit alleging that you defrauded your customers by selling them a product that doesn’t actually do anything?

This product is NOT, in any way shape or form, a “scam”. It is a product that was awarded two patents from the U.S. Patent Office

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Object does not confirm that the inventions described in patent applications actually work, but rather that they could work if the claims made in the application are accurate. The fact that Marc Smulovitz managed to obtain two patents for his invention (#6,012,308 and #6,612,137, for those who want to read for themselves) indicates only that no one tried before him to patent the idea of using magnets to clean laundry; it has absolutely no bearing on the question of whether magnets actually can clean laundry.

Although magnetically influencing water is a concept somewhat “out of the mainstream” (our patents were some of the first in the field) there has been scientific precedence to support the theory. Although it is fair to challenge theories that are new, different and out of the mainstream, it is exceedingly unfair to call them a “scam”.

No one has denied that magnets can “influence water;” that is a red herring.

Rather, the questions at hand are (a) do wimpy magnets like the ones you sell “influence water” in any significant way, and (b) does whatever “influence” they have on the water actually have any impact on the water’s ability to clean clothes?

Coming full circle: As I noted above, there is a trivially easy experiment you could pay an independent laboratory to do which would prove that the answers to both of those questions is “yes.” The fact that you have not had any laboratory perform that experiment, or indeed the fact that it appears that you did have a laboratory perform that experiment and then concealed the results, suggests that you are fully aware of what the results would be, and that they wouldn’t exactly help to sell your product.

If you prove me wrong, then I will gladly publicly apologize for disputing the efficacy of your product and remove the critical article from my blog.

Tags: laundry magnets, life miracle, magnetic laundry system

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 4th, 2009 at 11:44 pm and is filed under Consumer activism, Fraud. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.