I was chatting with my friend Mike, when he brought up something very interesting…

PURELL® Instant Hand Sanitizer boasts that it “Kills 99.9% of most common germs that may cause illness […]”. This is quite an amazing feat, until you look again at the sentence. I’d like to draw your attention to the words “Most” and “Common.”

Now, we know that most means more than 50%. To give them the benefit of a doubt and all that, we’ll say it means at least 51%. So they claim their product kills at least 99.9% of 51% of common disease-causing germs. That’s 50.949%.

Now what about common? Who’s to say which germs are common? Well, again we’ll give them the leeway and assume that 95% of your contact with disease-causing germs falls under what they call “common.”

We are now at 48.40155% of disease-causing germs that this stuff kills. What kind of a garauntee is that? What’s next, a seatbelt that will remain intact in 48.40155% of all car accidents? Maybe a new technique that fills in 48.40155% of every cavity. Seriously, advertisers are obviously not hired for their honesty.

So remember… always read the fine print.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 5th, 2006 at 11:43 pm and is filed under Rants. 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.