Italian women spend an average of 21 hours a week on household chores, and Americans spend just four, according to the Wall Street Journal.
We know all this because Procter & Gamble has checked. That's a company which lives on cleaning, or rather on people buying their cleaning supplies. How many hours Italian men and American men spend on cleaning has not been made available to the public. I guess that may have been too embarrassing to both groups of men.
Italian women supposedly wash their kitchen and bathroom floors at least four times a week, American women just once. And Italians iron nearly all their wash, even socks and sheets.
Ah, that does sound quite nice, at least if you're an Italian male.
Problem (for P&G at least) is that Italian women like traditional cleaning supplies, like water in a bucket. That doesn't make any corporation rich.
Whatever we use must be throw-away, like a Swiffer Sweeper. So we have to buy new swiffers, or sweepers, or whatever. American women are used to throwing things away, so those products sell like hotcakes in this country, but in Italy the Swiffer Wet Mop was such a flop that the company took it off the market.
For some reason Italians don't get sold on "convenience" they actually want things to be "clean." Once American companies discovered this, their whole marketing approach changed. P&G started selling the Swiffer as an after-the-bucket-finisher. And that worked.
Because nothing can be too clean in Italy.
Come to think of it, I don't think Italians would ever accept the wall-to-wall carpets we place in every public space. You can't even use a bucket of water on that stuff and it never gets clean. The worst place for those carpets is in hospital rooms. First time I saw such hygiene blasphemy I couldn't believe my eyes. I'd never seen a carpet in any Swedish hospital. In fact, I used to work as a hospital orderly every summer for many years in my youth and I know what ends up on hospital floors. Wall-to-wall carpet in a hospital? That's like a Petri dish for fungi and bacteria. No wonder many patients get infections while in hospitals.
And what might completely horrify the Italians are our "air fresheners." First, if you have a clean house, or car, you don't need an air freshener. Second, did you ever check what's in that plug-in heating device that disperses chemicals into the air? They work by interfering with your ability to smell, using a nerve-deadening agent and many coat your nasal passages with an undetectable oil film.
Most synthetic air freshener fragrances contain benzene derivatives, aldehydes and many other known toxics and sensitizers -- capable of causing cancer, birth defects, central nervous system disorders and allergic reactions. One of the most common chemicals found in air fresheners is "formaldehyde", a known carcinogen.
Icky! You can read more here.
Finally, I have to admit that I, too, gave in to convenience. I recently bought one of those clip-on toilet brush systems. Then I realized that if I kept clipping on those things as often as they were needed, I would soon spend more on the toilet brush system than on my New York Times subscription. I decided the New York Times was more important to me.
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