Cutting the Fat: the Ab Scissor Ultra

Cutting is the theme for this week, and so we present to you the Ab Scissor Ultra:




Impressive in its Spartan décor, no? It seems like Body by Jake interrupted a Thornton Wilder play to put on this commercial. On top of that, it appears that Steve Maresca was told to tone his excitement down to a whisper, which begs wonder: did they shoot this video in a library? This brings us to the main thing the Ab Scissor Ultra cuts: costs. All the other cuts in production and everything else stem from Body by Jake’s frugality. For instance, the official video on Body by Jake’s website (in the upper right hand corner) is not even a complete video. The player cannot be expanded, so we must squint to see what’s going on (the You Tube version of the website video is choppy and grainy at times, especially around the abdominal area for many of the interviewees [fitting?]). They clearly did not hire a professional web designer to make the site. There are no frilly extras in the website video either: just the basic interviews and before-and-afters. Going back to the video above, it appears they did the whole thing in one take because Steve messes up his line 27 seconds in and corrects himself; we assume they could not afford to pay someone to do the editing.

What’s strange about the parsimonious attitude is the cost of the machine. (Here we must interrupt ourselves to congratulate Body by Jake for proudly displaying the cost of their machine on their website, without having someone pretend to order the machine just to see how much it costs.) If you want to pay for the machine in full, it will cost you $159 without tax and shipping. If you’d like to set up a payment plan, then be prepared to pay $99.50 twice, which is (let me bust out the calculator here…) $199! The video on the website boasts that it has sold more than 700,000 of these “scissors” already. Assuming their demographic is the cheap chubby chum who did the math, and assuming by “over 700,000” they mean 700,001, then—without tax and shipping—they have $111,300,159. So they made over a hundred million dollars already, and they couldn’t afford a second take for poor Mr. Maresca?

Something isn’t quite right here. The Ab Scissor looks like a simplified torture device from the middle ages, so it could not have cost that much to make. There’s almost nothing to this machine. It’s a chair with foot rests and overarching handle bars. The freebies offered are the bare minimum, required for any ab workout (even Sean T’s!): an eating guide, a video, instructions, and a log. The government couldn’t really be taking that much from their sales, and there doesn’t seem like they have a multitude of employees to pay. Unless “Kat” was demanding a huge salary for her (literal) minute of fame, we cannot fathom why they cut everything else.

Body by Jake cuts on cost and production for their Ab Scissor Ultra while swearing it will cut the fat from your midsection (hopefully not literally). We would much rather cut ourselves than purchase a simplistic machine presented to us so shoddily.