Rent-A-Wife - Are They for Real?!
I realize this has nothing to do with travel but I couldn’t help myself. This week I got a flyer in my mailbox from a home service based in Toronto and Ottawa called Rent-A-Wife. You’ve gotta be kidding me! (Note to self: remember to put that ‘No junk please’ sign on our mailbox). I had to read the flyer over and again to figure out if this was a joke or not. No joke. They provide bodies (allegedly both male and female) that will help you organize your home around the following services: cleaning & organizing, property staging & home décor (i.e., decluttering, room makeovers), repairs & maintenance, and hospitality services (i.e., cooking). And they use the traditional image of the wife as the homemaker to try to instill trust in their services. Why not rent-a-hand or rent-a-friend? Do they really get away with such an insulting and demeaning name by simply stating that "the whole point of the name is to legitimize work traditionally done by women in the home"? This has to be one of the worst names ever to be given to a business. Or maybe this simply proves that I’m not their target market.
Funny enough, there is a slightly racier European equivalent. Rent-A-Wife.be in Belgium also offers home services but they go a step further by letting you specify what this person looks like (hair colour, eye colour, measurements, and even race!). And their warranty – you can send them back whenever you’ve had enough of them. They’ll send you a new one from their catalogue that matches your requirements within 24 hours. I guess if you’re going to have someone inside your home doing your menial tasks for you, you may as well have someone you enjoy looking at?! This ad says it all (it’s in French but no explanation is necessary for the non-French speakers).
To go back to my original point about Rent-A-Wife being such a ridiculous name for a legitimate business, it turns out this cheeky ad is only an advertising spoof for an online DVD rental business, dvdpost.be, which uses an outrageous business idea to catch people’s attention! I thought that was brilliant.
This article was posted by Veronica Montero
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