Not so long ago, if you heard “wipe” used as a noun, you probably thought of a baby’s bottom. That was in the late nineties, when baby wipes made up eighty-two percent of the “wipe market.” Now, of course, you can buy disposable cloths soaked in just about any kind of fluid and stuffed into an airtight plastic container. There are wipes to clean your car’s dashboard, wipes to clean up stray dabs of paint, wipes to clean your dog’s ears. But it was the recent arrival, by mail, of a Palmolive DishWipe sample that gave me pause. I don’t think of myself as old—on a good day, I’ll get carded at the liquor store checkout—but I realized that I’d somehow missed this revolutionary wipe wave, been left, so to speak, in the dust.
When I was a child, my siblings and I had cleaning duties to fulfill every week in exchange for our allowance, and I guess the methods we used back in those pre-wipe days have stuck. We stuck our little hands into the too-big yellow rubber gloves and scrubbed, dusted, sudsed, or vacuumed according to Mom’s instructions. She seemed to know best then, and to this day I still save old T-shirts for dusting and toothbrushes for getting into nooks, and I have worn holes in the knees of my “cleaning jeans.” Housework is work.
But that kind of work is about as old-fashioned as a Chore Boy copper scrubber. Apparently, the new way to clean involves a lot of wiping, misting, Swiffing, and tossing. Sponges (like “dishrags” before them) face extinction because cleaning implements should immediately be thrown away after use. At this rate it won’t be long before good old elbow grease is eradicated with a squeal of disgust by consumers brandishing plastic cylinders of grease-cutting Mr. Clean Wipes. While manufacturers are making big bucks on these presoaked disposable cloths, one has to wonder why it took so long for them to invent cleaning products that work the same way we want everything else to work: immediately, and with as little effort as possible.
Still, there’s a contradiction brewing. While wipe culture enables a quick-and-easy approach to cleaning, at the same time it cultivates a rapid-growth disgust of bacteria, dirt, and germs. I began to look more closely at the offerings in the cleaning aisle at my local Cub Foods. Along the bottom shelves, plastered with big yellow “PRICE CUT!” labels that made them seem desperate, were the same powder cleaners my mom swears by. It’s no surprise. Using those involves a whole lot of scrubbing, and why scrub when we can wipe or, better yet, mist? On an eye-level shelf, I zeroed in on an improbable-sounding Scrub-Free Disinfectant and Bathroom Cleaner. Disinfect with no scrubbing? Tell me more! The instructions began, “Remove gross filth or heavy soil prior to application of the product.” Now, I’m no expert on what it takes to remove “gross filth” (which sounds suspiciously like a euphemism for “dirt”), but I bet it would take some scrubbing.
Okay, so a product that sounds too good to be true probably is. It turns out that wipes and many of the “scrub-free” products are meant for use between those occasions when we get in there and really scrub. But this raises another contradiction: Why put on ratty jeans and a sweatshirt and spend a whole Saturday sanitizing the house when we can take care of visible grot with a few wipes? Why scrub a floor that has that “just Swiffered” glow? If it looks clean, isn’t that good enough? Journalist Barbara Ehrenreich, in the course of writing Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America, took a job at Merry Maids, where she was trained in the franchise’s techniques for housecleaning. In addition to working as quickly as possible, she found, cleaning consisted of dampening a cloth with the appropriate fluid and then wiping down every surface. She felt like she was merely pushing dirt around instead of banishing it the way her mother taught her: with buckets of scalding sudsy water. After checking in with an expert who confirmed her suspicion, she came to the conclusion that “the point at The Maids, apparently, is not to clean so much as to create the appearance of having been cleaned.” And thousands of Merry Maid customers are just fine with that. But at least they’re keeping their homes presentable, even if they’re not doing the work themselves. For those of us who don’t hire Merry Maids, or even less-merry housecleaners, it’s often a different story.
Somehow we’ve raised ourselves above the indignity of unpleasant household tasks that were once commonplace. The respect that was once accorded to getting things spic-and-span with a good hard scrubbing has been replaced with squeamishness. I was struck by a scene in Jonathan Franzen’s novel The Corrections in which a son watches in disgust as his mother, raised during the Depression, scrapes bits of food from the sink trap into the garbage can. Our revulsion over such tasks translates into profits for those manufacturers who produce wipes and other gadgets that promise to virtually eliminate cleaning. At the very least, they ensure that we don’t come into direct contact with dirt, and that we can throw away anything that does.
More easily grossed-out consumers and easier profits for manufacturers of cleaning products do not necessary equate to cleaner homes. From 1999 to 2004, while sales of air fresheners went up thirty percent, the household cleaning products market declined almost nine percent. No matter how many air fresheners we spray around, light up, or plug in, we eventually have to clean up the source of our stink. And when that happens, the Clorox ToiletWand is there.
Let’s look at the evolution of no one’s favorite cleaning job. The old way to clean a toilet was to kneel down and get up close, making sure to scrub the throne in all its awkward angles, thereby developing a forced intimacy with this place where we crap. Once the toilet brush was invented, we could remain a full twelve inches or more from the worst parts. This was a great improvement, but now we had the problem of storing a brush—soaked in toilet water, possibly contaminated with flecks of feces—right there next to the commode. There are two solutions to that problem: Go back to kneeling and scrubbing, or throw away the offending brush after each use. Faced with this choice, it seems consumers are more than willing to spend extra on disposable brushes.
Of course, the cleaning revolution didn’t come without a reason. We need our cleaning problems wiped away because we’re all busier than ever and many of us, especially those in the burgeoning class of one-member households, are home less than we used to be. We stop in for a bit after being at work all day, and then go out again for the evening or park ourselves in front of the TV or computer. On top of that, houses are getting bigger (in the last thirty years, the average new one-family home has grown by 670 square feet), even as the time spent cleaning them shrinks.
In Outwitting Housework: Brilliant Tips, Tricks, and Advice on Housekeeping… and Life, much of author Nancy Rosenberg’s advice involves using stolen moments to keep up with cleaning. Wipe the bathroom mirror while brushing your teeth; straighten a closet while waiting for the shower to run hot. That all sounds fine, but should we really be using those precious extra minutes for spot cleaning? Why not sneak in a little cardio, eat some whole grains, catch up on e-mail, weed the garden, or do any of the other million things that constantly need doing? Rosenberg, however, doggedly attempts to turn our values back to the days when a sparkling home and the work to get it that way was a point of pride. “Don’t think of housekeeping as cleaning, or chores, or drudgery. Don’t think of it in negative terms,” she writes. “Instead, see this as a gift you give to yourself. See this as a tool that will make your life easier, less complicated, and more manageable.”
I’m willing to try, but I’d prefer to give myself the gift of a Roomba Floorvac, the little robot that “automatically senses, finds, and eliminates dirt!” Then I’ll never have to vacuum or even Swiffer again. I’m going to hold out until they invent a disposable Roomba that rolls itself right out to the garbage after filling up with my gross filth. Then my conversion to the new clean will be complete.
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