Women in Italy LikeTo Clean
But Shun Quick and Easy

Convenience Doesn't SellWhen Bathrooms AverageFour Scrubbings a Week. Italian women keep some of the cleanest homes around.They spend, on average, 21 hours a week on household chores other than cooking -- compared with just four hours for Americans, according toProcter & Gamble Co. research.

Italians wash kitchen and bathroom floors at least four times a week, Americans just once. Italians typically iron nearly all their wash, even socks and sheets. And they buy more cleaning supplies than women elsewhere do.

All that should make them the perfect customers for the manufacturers of cleaning products.
But when Unilever launched an all-purpose spray cleaner about six years ago, the product flopped. And when Procter & Gamble tested its top-selling Swiffer Wet mop, which eliminates the need for a clunky bucket of water, the product bombed so badly in Italy that P&G took itoff the market.

What the world's biggest consumer-products companies failed to realize is that what sells products elsewhere -- labor-saving convenience -- is abig turn off here. Italian women want products that are tough cleaners, not time savers.

The Italians "are not ready for convenience in the way Americans are,"says Elio Leoni Sceti, chief marketing officer at Reckitt Benckiser PLC, maker of Lysol cleaner and Woolite laundry detergent. "It's perceived asa step back."

So, for companies like P&G, Unilever and appliance makers like WhirlpoolCorp., that means turning their products and marketing inside out to try to win over Italy. After its Cif brand spray cleaner flopped, Unilever researchers polled consumers and discovered that Italian women needed to be convinced that a spray could be strong enough, especially on kitchen grease. So, the company spent 18 months reformulating the product and testing how thoroughly it wiped away grease.

Because Italian women believe they need different cleaners for different tasks, it also came up with several varieties, including one for removing limescale from bathroom fixtures. Unilever made the bottles 50% bigger because Italians clean so frequently. It also changed Cif television ads to tout the cleaner's strength, scrapping initial ads that portrayed it as convenient.

"It was a real shift of mind-set on how to market products like these,"says Alessandra Bellini, head of marketing for Unilever's Italian home and personal-care products. "If you present a product as quick and easy,women may feel like a cheat....It took us a while to understand that Italians don't want that."

Now, the products are selling well, the company says. P&G also went back to the Swiffer drawing board after its Wet mop flop.The company realized that Italian women were skeptical it could work on their dirty floor but had been using it to polish after mopping. So P&G came up with a Swiffer with beeswax, which it sells only in Italy. P&G also introduced the Swiffer duster, which is available in many countries but has proved to be an Italian best-seller. It sold five million boxes in the first eight months, twice the company's forecasts. Italy is now the biggest European market for Swiffer products.

Indeed, Italians pay up for premium brands, and about 72% of Italians own more than eight cleaning products, according to Unilever research. In Rome, Lavinia Sansoni cleans the bathroom in her apartment every day. On weekends, the 26-year-old office worker also dusts shelves and paintings and above the doors.

She tried 20 different cleaners until she found a specialty cleaner made by appliance company Miele that satisfactorily cleaned food stains off her stove top. She can spend as much as $50 a month on cleaning supplies.

"I like my house really, really clean," Ms. Sansoni says. "Everything has to absolutely shine."
After World War II, Italy remained a poor country until well into the1960s, so labor-saving devices like washing machines that had become popular in wealthy countries arrived late. And Italian women have joined the work force much later and in smaller numbers. Even today, as younger women increasingly work outside the home, they still spend nearly as much time as their mothers did on housework, the companies say.

More and more career women, particularly in the north, employ housekeepers -- and ride herd on them. Laura Maresti, a 42-year-old photo editor, has taught her cleaning lady exactly how she likes her towels ironed: pressed with a fold so they hang just so on the bathroom rack.The cleaning lady also irons sheets, underwear and T-shirts. "This is the way my mother did things," Ms. Maresti says.

Paolo Follador, owner of a Milan cleaning service company, gives his new workers 20 hours of training before sending them into Italian homes. Even so, Italian women closely follow his workers to ensure they do a good enough job. Recently, his workers spent hours cleaning each crystal pendant of a chandelier in one Italian home. The owner wasn't satisfied,however, and made them redo it three more times. Another woman asked his workers to use lemon to clean her shower stall. In that case, Mr.Follador refused. "If we did everything they asked us to do, we'd never get the job done," he says. "They check everything."

Even basic product updates haven't caught on. Only about 30% of Italian households have dishwashers because many women don't trust machines to get dishes as clean as they can get them by hand, manufacturers say. Many of those who have machines tend to thoroughly rinse the dishes before loading them in the machine.

"They say they don't want a dishwasher because it'll be twice as much work," says Mario Franzino, head of Bosch und Siemens Hausgerate GmbH, a joint venture between Robert Bosch GmbH and Siemens AG, based in Munich. It makes the Bosch brand of home appliances.

So in an attempt to convince them otherwise, machine and soap makers including Bosch, Whirlpool, Electrolux AB, and Reckitt have come up withjoint marketing campaigns plugging away at the claim that machines get dishes as clean as hand-washing does. A new radio ad set explains that a dishwasher uses much higher water temperatures than hand washing.

Washing-machine makers are still working at persuading the Italians, famously fastidious dressers, to entrust their clothes to their machines. Italians worry that machines will ruin the fabric. The companies' solution: models with slow spin cycles as low as 400 spins per minute, compared with 1,200 to 1,600 common in machines in the U.S. and elsewhere in Europe.

The Bosch brand introduced a new European model this month with three separate cycles for wool, silk and synthetic fabrics. The machine, Maxx6, even has a special gentle cycle for jeans because Italians consider them delicate and worry that they will lose their color or shape in a regular cycle. Consumers can also create and save their own cycles by choosing exact combinations of temperature and spin speed.
(Condensed from an article in the Wall Street Journal.)

State Turning Airport Rejects
Into Quick Cash On eBay

Items too big or dangerous to go on a plane end up for sale online. Five thousand corkscrews. A hundred pairs of fur-lined handcuffs. A dozen blenders. Four chainsaws. A suture-removal kit. Three thousand pairs of scissors. One pink horseshoe.
Check what the state of Pennsylvania has for sale on eBay.

All were left behind at airports across the Northeast and all have made their way to a warehouse in Harrisburg where the state sorts them and sells them on eBay.

"It's amazing what we find," said Ken Hess, director of the state bureau of supplies and surplus operations. Some items, such as nail clippers and pocket knives, are things travelers were forced to surrender before boarding planes. Some, such as a 6-foot artificial palm tree and a 250-pound car engine, apparently were too big or heavy to be carried on. And others, such as sunglasses and children's toys, were left behind by absent-minded travelers.

Together, they have yielded the state more than $247,000 in revenue in less than two years.
The Transportation Security Administration releases the items to states that request them, giving priority to those where the airports are located. The goods arrive -- an average of 21,000 pounds' worth every month -- in trailers driven by student truck drivers at the Lancaster Career and Technical School.

The biggest shipments come from Newark International Airport and from Kennedy and LaGuardia in New York City. Goods also arrive from Philadelphia, Harrisburg, Cleveland, Allentown and Syracuse airports.

Recent deliveries included frying pans, a caulking gun, an ornate curtain rod, Virgin Mary nail clippers, a roll of undeveloped film, a hand tool inscribed "To Lou: Happy 50th birthday," and a fishing trophy from Cayuga Lake, N.Y.

"We get a lot of S&M stuff. There's whips we've gotten and even cat o' nine tails that I guess people beat each other with, and there's tons and tons of furry handcuffs," he said. In another area of the warehouse, worker Mike Whitman, 34, is sorting weapons. "Here's how we know the airport screeners are doing their jobs," Mr. Hess said as he perused a dagger, a combat knife, a replica of a World War II K-Bar and a serrated knife with a pistol grip.

The flotsam and jetsam arrive in Harrisburg -- mixed with toy guns, fishing hooks and hockey pucks -- in plastic totes or 55-gallon drums. They are sorted into lots, photographed, logged on the eBay auction site, boxed and shipped to the highest bidder. Recently, one eBayer picked up 35 pounds of scissors for $34 plus shipping. Another bought 100 pocket knives for $55.55.
The highest single bid to date was $595 from a buyer in Torrance, Calif., for 39 pounds of Swiss Army knives.
(Condensed from an article in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette.)

When the brain doesn't know when to stop
Obsessions control patients' lives

Shannon Fleishman sat in her room at McLean Hospital, eyes shut tight, hands clenched together until her knuckles were white. She was shaking. I watched her and thought, "If I didn't know the truth, I'd think she was a cocaine addict who just ran out of drugs." But that wasn't it. Shannon Fleishman was trying to fold a shirt.

Dr. Carol Hevia, Shannon's therapist, told Shannon to stop smoothing out every tiny wrinkle, to stop lining up edges of the shirt just right. After what seemed like an eternity, the shirt was folded. It looked fine to me. But that's the crux of Shannon's disease: What looks fine to others is a mess to her. It took every ounce of Shannon's willpower to just leave the shirt alone, to stop trying to make it look perfect.

Shannon's Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder is particularly severe, requiring three months of inpatient treatment at McLean, just outside of Boston. MRIs of the brain of people with OCD show that areas responsible for simple decisions -- like whether a shirt is folded right or not -- are hyperactive.

There are various forms of OCD, and Shannon's centers around perfection. Other patients have other issues, as I was soon to learn at McLean. When I asked to use the restroom, a staff member said, "Well, there's that one there, but let's get you another one, because this one doesn't have soap." When I asked why not, he said many of the patients had hand-washing compulsions, and if they just let them into a bathroom with soap, they would be there for literally hours, scrubbing and scrubbing. Patients were therefore given just a tiny cup with soap, and two paper towels, and their visits to the bathroom were timed.

Shannon's OCD was different. Hers was all about how things looked. Just before her admission to McLean, Shannon had gotten to the point where she would just give up. Folding one shirt would take hours. She could go grocery shopping just fine, but in the end the food would sit out on the counter, because she couldn't line the cans up exactly right in the cupboard, and she'd give up.

She would rise at 7 a.m. to get ready for work, which started at 5 p.m. It took her that long to shower and get her clothes ready. I asked Shannon what her worst day was. It didn't take her long to remember her 8-hour bath. What's strange about OCD is that many people seem perfectly fine outside their one area of obsession.

Sitting and chatting with Shannon, she seemed like a friend. We chatted about her art (she's very gifted) and her plans to run a marathon, and her experience pitching softball at her Division I college. Shannon Fleishman is only 24. She has another six weeks left at McLean. When I said goodbye, I hoped that this therapy would work, that someday soon her brain would know when to stop folding a shirt.
(Condensed from an article by Elizabeth Cohen for CNN.)