Finding An Outlet

These smart outlets were Wirecutter’s budget pick at twice this price. “Reliable, easy to set up and use, and the least expensive model available,” they said, making (we think) a pretty convincing case.

But you might be confused if you clicked through that link, because Wirecutter was talking about a “Geeni Energy” outlet, not one made by “Merkury Innovations.” You might even think we’re trying to pull the wool over your eyes. But we have no such woolen vision-obscuring intentions: Merkury Innovations turns out to be the parent company of Geeni and they switched the branding on these smart outlets from one to the other without changing the product (so far as we can tell).

We love complicated stories behind deals like this because we have the space here to tell them. Other sites would have to sell these as “Merkury Innovations” and hope their customers would be savvy and interested enough to figure out that they’re the same thing as Geeni, but we get to explicitly tell y’all WTF is happening. Deals with confusing backstories like this are the reason we exist, sadly.

However self-satisfied we may feel about this advantage, we’re not fooling ourselves into thinking that most folks will actually read the write-up. In fact, we doubt that most people make it past the first sentence. So sometimes we get a little sneaky and give the (slightly oversimplified) TL;DR in the first sentence. Those few of you who made it this far know we weren’t exactly telling the full truth by saying: “These smart outlets were Wirecutter’s budget pick at twice this price.” But we weren’t exactly lying, either. We gave those first-sentence-glancers the information they needed.

You’ve ventured to the fifth paragraph and now find yourself in truly elite company. I, @skemmehs, the writer of this torturous explanation, will let you know that I’m considering buying these outlets myself now that I understand how and why they came to be so cheap. And I don’t give two shits about smart homes or know what I’d do with them if I bought them. The new version of the app apparently tracks energy usage, though, and I’m a sucker for graphs and data. Will graphing the energy consumption of my desk lamp somehow improve or even alter my life in any meaningful way? Probably not. But then, what will?

So I’ll let the handful of you left here in the sixth paragraph know the real truth: Nothing matters. We sell stuff here. I write about it. You might buy it. None of those outcomes will perceptibly affect the universe 1000 years from now, so why are we all so worried? Let’s accept our looming mortality and do what we want with the few brief hours we have to strut about this dumb stage.

Don’t worry about me, @dave. I know you’re the only one who has read this far and things got pretty bleak, but I’m doing all right. While I have your attention: Did you want me to do something with that video for tomorrow’s product?