[Student Voices] Can You Believe It or Not?
Published: 18 Nov. 2024, 11:24
Updated: 18 Nov. 2024, 15:24
Hamin An, Seoul Ilwon Elementary School
By Hamin An, Seoul Ilwon Elementary School
A few years ago, my mom bought me a Rube Goldberg machine that I saw on a TV commercial. On TV, I watched a marble roll down ramps, go up an escalator, and fall off bridges before it finally rang three bells. Ding! Ding! Ding! The toy looked really cool.
However, the reality was different from what I saw on TV. In the advertisement, the price was $30. But when my mom went online to buy it, she had to pay $37. When I got the package and built the toy, I found that it only had one bell. Ding... Also, the advertisement said only a few parts of the toy needed batteries to work. It turned out that many parts needed batteries! I couldn’t use the toy for a long, long, long time because the special batteries took three weeks to arrive.
Something similar happened to a friend of mine. He ordered a Lego gun that looked really cool in the advertisement. But the toy he received was very different. All the colors were wrong, and it couldn’t shoot rubber bands like it did in the ad. It turned out to be a scam where the seller used pictures from Google and pretended they were the item he was selling.
Two years after the Lego gun incident, I got tricked by the internet again. It was when I decided to buy an item I had wanted for nine months: a Manchester United Team Viewer Adidas Ronaldo 7 shirt on Coupang. The listing said the item was coming from Thailand, but it really shipped from China. When it arrived after two months, I saw that there was no number 7 on the shirt, and the name “Ronaldo” was not on the back! Also, it didn’t say “Adidas” or any other brand. I could hardly believe my eyes. I had used $22.58 for this! I cried for one hour, until there were no tears left to fall. I never wore the fake Ronaldo shirt to school, and I didn’t talk about it either. It reminded me of how I had been tricked.
There are many ways that advertisements deceive us. Consider the food you see in advertising images. Pizza places can use glue instead of cheese to make it look more stretchy. Some restaurants put sponges inside hamburgers to make them look taller, and they use toothpicks to hold the ingredients in place. For steak, they often drench it in oil, which creates the illusion that the meat is juicy and freshly cooked.
The other day, I saw an advertisement for an English academy with a kid who looked about eight years old but was holding middle school books and a novel that looked as big as he was. It made me think, “That’s impossible. They want to make that little kid look smarter than he really is. If parents pay for this, their kids are never going to be that smart.”
Nowadays, I’m extra careful when I buy something online. I always look at who’s selling. Do they have good feedback? Can I trust the seller? Then I look for other sources of information about the product. I keep in mind that if a product is too cheap, there is probably something wrong with it. I look closely at the product to make sure it’s genuine, and that all the brand markings are visible. Finally, I don’t let advertisements deceive me.
The next time I order a Rube Goldberg machine, I’m going to make sure it has everything it’s supposed to have. Ding! Ding! Ding!
with the Korea JoongAng Daily
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