Gillette. The Best a Geek Can Get?

I lost my shaving stuff somewhere between London and Seattle last week. So I went off to the local shop and was confronted by an array of choice. I've been a Gillette 'man' for as long as I can remember shaving. So when I looked at the Gillette shelf, I was intrigued to see the new M3Power product.

I mulled it over, but my inner geek won over and decided to go for the gadgetry. It has a battery in the handle...oooh. And there's a good ROI case here...(read on)

I tried it out on four days growth, and it was like a hot knife through butter.

There are no moving parts. When you switch on the power (by pressing on an ergonomically positioned geeky luminous green button on the handle) it begins to hum and you feel a very slight vibration in the handle.

When the power is on, you can't see anything move. It just hums away. But there is a huge difference between having the power on and having the power on when using it. With it on, it really glides. It's a faster shave. A lot faster.

No cuts - and I tried. It's a closer shave. A lot closer. Look:

I love Gillette. Over the years they've brought out great products that ooze technological advancement. This latest offering does it for me. I've stayed away from the electric shavers for one reason or another, but the M3Power really works. It's like Steve Austin. Faster and a closer shave.

It feels so....nano.

I'm actually looking forward to my next shave. Are you?

Now, in case you're wondering, no, I'm not sponsored by Gillette. but I wish I was though. I'd save hundreds of dollars a year...shaving is expensive business.

The ROI

But here's the thing. There is a good ROI here.

Shaving is time consuming stuff. Taking an average of 3 minutes per shave and shaving each day works out to about 18 hours a year. That's a lot of unproductive down time.

In actual fact, I tend to shave once every two days. So this works out to be around 9.1 hours a year. For most people that's a whole working day.  But I think with the M3P I can shave <groan> that down quite a bit, over two dimensions. The first is the amount of time spent shaving. For me, the average shave using the M3P has gone down from about 3 minutes down to about a minute and a half. The second dimension is the closeness of the shave. It's a lot closer than using my old Mach 3. So instead of shaving once every 2 days, I think I can get away with shaving once every three days. That brings the total annual shave time to 3 hours - down from 9 hours. That's a whopping 6 hours saved in one year.

Of course, buying batteries is an additional cost (I don't know how long it'll last shaving once every three days at 1 and half minutes per shave) and the replacement blades cost more than the Mach 3 blades (TCO), but hey - over ten years I'll save myself 60 hours - 7 working days!

Think of all that time I could waste! (like, writing this post, for instance) I'll have some of that.