Do Elephants Jump? (10 page)

This is a mystery dear to the hearts of
Imponderables
readers, and, we admit, to ours, too. Many is the time when we have pranced into the kitchen around midnight, opened the freezer, and ever mindful of the importance of nutrition, contemplate choosing a Ben & Jerry’s dessert based on which contained the most calcium. If we had sufficient reading light before we took the stuff out of the freezer to know that one half-cup of the Chocolate Fudge Brownie frozen yogurt contained 20 percent of our daily calcium requirement, it might not have been necessary to eat ten half-cups of Cherry Garcia to make sure our calcium needs were met.

We posed this Imponderable to marketing and engineering types in the appliance industry, and their answers surprised us a bit. We assumed that a lightbulb would affect a freezer’s ability to keep the freezer area cold enough, but since users rarely keep a freezer door open for long, the experts assured us that the energy usage involved in installing a light in the freezer would be negligible.

One of our sources, consulting engineer J. Benjamin Horvay, former chairman of the technical committee of the American Society of Heating, Refrigeration, and Air-Conditioning Engineers, suggests that not everyone is obsessed with reading nutritional panels in the dark as we are:

Since we first received this Imponderable, more than a decade ago, lights in freezers
have
begun to appear more often. Perhaps the growing popularity of the side-by-side refrigerator-freezer, with more space devoted to the freezer, might account for some of the rise of the illuminated freezer compartment.

All the experts we consulted mentioned cost as the main obstacle to installing lights in freezers. Dick Stilwill, of the National Appliance Parts Suppliers Association, notes that lights tend to appear in high-end models; lower-priced models will lack a door switch, wiring harness, socket, and bulb:

Product planners at the big appliance manufacturers decide which models will carry which features. Not unlike automobiles, appliance manufacturers can sometimes sell a refrigerator for much more money by spending only a little on “high-end” features. But as Ron Anderson, manager of advanced engineering in refrigeration at Amana told us, there are also expenses involved in bringing out a multitude of different models with only a few features differentiating them. Anderson says that the product planners will do an analysis of what competitors are offering at various price points; freezer lights would rarely be the make-or-break feature to a purchaser.

Still, the smaller manufacturers have to watch what the market leaders are offering. If volume leader General Electric, for example, offers lights in the freezers of its mid-priced refrigerators, the smaller players would have to consider offering them, too, or risk being at a competitive disadvantage.

Anderson mentioned Kano Analysis, a method of evaluating what is important to consumers, as a tool for evaluating the importance of features such as freezer lights. Developed by a Japanese engineer, Nariaki Kano, Kano Analysis argues that some features of a product (or service) satisfy customers in ways disproportionate to its functionality or cost to manufacture. The lowest and most basic level of quality to a consumer is a “dissatisfier.” This is an attribute of a product that is so fundamental to the consumer that if it functions well, the customer doesn’t necessarily feel any satisfaction. For example, it’s unlikely that someone will rave about her refrigerator because “None of my food has been spoiled.” Keeping the contents of the refrigerator cool is a basic attribute; if it doesn’t perform, the consumer will be livid, but if it does perform adequately, it evokes no emotional response in the customer. The only emotion that a basic-level attribute is likely to generate will be negative — if the dissatisfier isn’t met satisfactorily.

The second level in Kano Analysis involves “satisfiers,” performance attributes that please the customer if fulfilled, and disappoint when not present. If a customer feels that the shelving in a refrigerator does not help keep food organized better than his last refrigerator, he might be dissatisfied; one that allows him to find his food more easily will satisfy him. It makes sense for manufacturers to focus on “satisfiers,” as satisfiers often provide the basis for meaningful contrasts between products. All the performance attributes that auto manufacturers stress in trade magazines fall into this category.

But surprisingly, Kano found that a third level, which he called “delighters,” can be crucial to the success of a product or service. These are attributes or features that are
not
essential to high quality and consumers don’t even consciously think they want. But they provide the consumer with a sense of delight, especially because these are features that the customer didn’t expect.

When folks explain why they appreciate an appliance, an automobile, or a meal at a restaurant, they tend to focus on “satisfiers,” but Kano points out that “delighters” have a disproportionate effect on consumers’ satisfaction levels, even when the cost is minimal to the business offering them. For example, the consumer might cite high fuel mileage as the reason for appreciating his new car, when he is secretly delighted by the vehicle’s cup holders, which are big enough to carry a Big Gulp cup from 7-Eleven, or by the push buttons on the stereo system. The restaurant patron might cite the succulence of the sirloin when praising a restaurant, when he was really wooed by the waitress bringing an extra portion of home-fried potatoes, gratis.

Can a light in the freezer really
delight
a patron? If you itemized the options in a refrigerator-freezer, few customers would likely spring an extra fifty dollars for a bare lightbulb, but is one lightbulb enough to swing a decision in purchasing a thousand-dollar item? This is the kind of question that product planners at Maytag and GE must contemplate.

As with the last Imponderable, money rears its ugly head. Most of us have plebeian controls on our appliances. Our ovens have temperature dials, of course, and when the oven reaches its appointed degree of heat, the oven clicks, or a light goes off. Our refrigerators have temperature controls, but they read from one to ten rather than in degrees.

But this is not so for the upper crust. If you want to spring $5,000 for a top-of-the-line Jenn-Air or Sub-Zero refrigerator, you can have precise temperature controls. We prefer to spend $4,000 less and be stuck with the 1–9/ “cold” to “coldest” controls on our humble GE.

Most of the appliance experts we spoke to thought putting in an expensive thermostat in an oven or refrigerator was much sillier than installing a lightbulb in the freezer. Dick Stilwill, of the National Appliance Parts Suppliers Association, observed:

More than a few bakers have good reason
not
to trust the accuracy of their thermostats, which is why most serious cooks own oven thermometers and instant-read thermometers to measure the internal temperature of food.

Unless there is an obvious malfunction, refrigerators are much less worrisome than ovens. Amana’s Ron Anderson points out that a “looser” control works almost as well as a thermostat in a refrigerator, as temperatures vary within the unit anyway: “It would be misleading to track the temperature in just one spot.”

While a ten-degree discrepancy in an oven might affect the results of a leg of lamb or a pastry, slight variations in temperature are unlikely to raise safety issues in a refrigerator or freezer. As Anderson puts it,

The consensus of our experts is that a more precise thermometer/thermostat is likely to be more of a “satisfier” than a “delighter.” The cheap dial on the lower-priced refrigerator is a mechanical connection instead of the much more costly line-voltage thermostat necessary for more precise temperature control. Frugal consumers are unlikely to want to pay up hundreds of dollars for built-in thermometer/thermostats when they can go to the hardware stores and buy stand-alone thermometers for a few bucks.

Skunks can dish out a foul scent. But can they take it?

If, like us, most of our education about skunks comes from animated cartoons, you might be surprised to learn that skunks don’t spray their noxious scent cavalierly. According to Skunks Scentral’s counselor Nina Simone,

What exactly happens when a skunk sprays? We asked Jerry Dragoo, interim curator of mammals at the Museum of Southwestern Biology in Albuquerque, who is quite the mephitologist (an expert on bad smells):

Perhaps cartoons aren’t far off the mark. Dragoo’s description of the “shotgun approach” is not unlike Pépé le Pew’s “cloud of stink bomb” method of foiling enemies.

But does the spray repulse other skunks? Our experts agree: “Yes.” Simone mentioned that when other skunks smell a whiff, they become agitated. It is unclear whether this is a chemical reaction to the smell, or if it signals danger to them. She compared skunks’ uneasy behavior when they smell other skunks’ sprays to “a dog before an earthquake.”

Considering that skunks don’t like the smell of other skunks, it’s surprising that they don’t use their “weapon” more often during “intramural” battles. One skunk expert e-mailed us:

If only humans were as accommodating!

But seriously, folks, we must delve into the seamier side of skunk behavior, for internecine spraying isn’t that unusual. The most common perpetrators of skunk-on-skunk abuse are juveniles. Janis Grant, vice president of North Alabama Wildlife Rehabilitators, wrote us:

Dragoo notes that just as juveniles display the stomp, chirp, and spray behavior, sometimes a weaker skunk will spray a stronger young rival “if it feels it is being bullied.” But they have been known to spray unknown adult skunks, too, “because adult males are known to kill young skunks.”

Dragoo describes skunks’ reaction to being sprayed as “the same behavior as other animals when they are sprayed”:

Are skunks, like humans, more tolerant of their own stench than others? According to Dragoo, skunks are not as egocentric: