The Wiki Man | 26 September 2009

If the definition of a true communist is someone who would willingly live for a month in 1970s Poland, the definition of a true capitalist should be anyone who could spend a month in Las Vegas while reading nothing but Hammacher Schlemmer mail order catalogues.

Even hardened materialists can find American consumerism a little much. A bizarre-looking $300 item I once saw turned out to be an oriel window for your cat. (The idea is that you fix this to your window frame so it protrudes through the sash window of your 32nd floor apartment, allowing your pet a 180° view of the outside world.)

But there is a good side to this. The sheer size of the American market makes it profitable to serve fantastically obscure needs — so, however bizarre your problem, you can solve it with a few minutes online trawling American retailers.

Last month at Heathrow I decided to search for braces which did not set off the X-ray machine at airport security. To my surprise I couldn’t find them anywhere. Then I remembered that Americans don’t call them braces but suspenders. Sure enough, a few Googles later I had found www.suspenderstore.com (a much less erotic site than it sounds to British ears) and had ordered my ‘BuzzNot Airport-Friendly Travel Suspenders’ for $19.95.

But if the range of gizmos is spectacular, the breadth of US online services is even more astounding. In my search for braces I came across an article on air-travel which mentioned several ‘virtual closet’ companies including www.justcarryon.com and www.garderobeonline.com. Joan Collins has already written in this magazine about www.firstluggage.com; the virtual closet takes this principle one step further. You simply send the company a bundle of your clothes and toiletries (a mixture of summer and winter clothing, ideally) and they photograph them before putting them into storage.