White elephant gadgets.

White elephant gadgets worth 9.4bn clutter up UK homes, says esure.com

(12 September 2005)

UK residents have forked out over £9.4bn * in their lifetimes on household gadgets that they believed were great buys at the time but have rarely, if ever, actually used, according to research by esure.com home insurance. This figure includes - measured by esure.com for the first time this year - £4.1bn on gifts for friends and family that end up gathering dust. A quarter of people polled (24%) actually admitted to wasting money on buying someone a household gadget as a gift that they suspected would remain in its box. Esure.com’s annual ‘Useless gadgets’ poll, commissioned by ICM, reveals that the sandwich toaster tops the ‘white elephant’ list for the third year running – that’s around £315m ** worth of abandoned toastie makers in UK homes. But 2005 sees the debut of the bathroom scales and fancy coffee machine in the top five list with one in three adults guilty of owning them but rarely, if ever, using them.


TOP 5 WHITE ELEPHANT GADGETS IN BRITISH HOMES:

Ranking - Item - % of adults admitting to owning but not using the item - Number of adults admitting to owning but not using the item

Holidaying to excess
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Brits are a Nation of Great Collectors
home insurance online owner rate Magazines/comics 7. The survey also shows that the nation’s average collection is worth just over £2,000 and that the UK is spending over half a billion pounds** each month on their hobby. Polar Bear trinkets The survey not only revealed what we collect and its value, but also how the nation catalogues such prize possessions. Rubbers/Erasers 4. Homepride ‘Fred’ figures 5. Read more...

BRITISH KIDS ARE TOYING WITH A FORTUNE.
32% have a PC in their bedroom. Save up to 15 per cent off normal premiums when you buy online. 10% have broadband connection. "It may surprise some parents, but our survey shows that British youngsters are quite literally, sleeping on a gold mine. Sample size of 1312 Population figures provided by the Office of National Statistics, as of December 2005, there were 13,221.4 million under 18 year olds. home insurance online owner rate Read more...

Scots are the most choosy when it comes to present buying, with just 17% admitting to buying someone a gadget gift that they expected would never actually be used, compared to 31% of East Midlanders - the worst culprits.

Sources

ICM Research interviewed a random selection of 1015 adults aged 18+, by telephone between the 17th and 18th of August 2005.

*£9.4bn is based on a population of 47.8m adults in the UK (source: National Statistics: Population Trends, Summer 2005) and calculated from esure.com’s research using an average of each price bracket. For example, 3% of people estimated they spent between £11 and £20 on white elephant items for themselves or as gifts. That’s 1,434,000 people (3% of the adult UK population) spending on average £15.50 on white elephant goods – totaling £22,227,000. Once each price bracket was calculated in this way, the sum total came to £9,398,267,400.

**Figure based on multiplying the average cost of a sandwich toaster on Argos.co.uk (£14.65) by the number of people admitting to owning but not using the item calculated from the ICM research and National Statistics: Population Trends, Summer 2005.