From the studio that brought you the ShamWow comes the innovative Slap Chop. Vince Offer, the loquacious pitchman, is eager to sell you this slicing contraption for $19.95 plus shipping and handling. In fact, with the special offer, you’ll get not one, but two Slap Chops, plus a Graty cheese grater, for the same price (when you pay separate shipping and handling)!

With one hand and some pent-up anger, you have an instant salad, according to the advertisements. Just place your food of choice under the circular chopping shield and hit the top of the Slap Chop once, twice, three times (depending on how finely chopped you’d like your food) to get little miniature versions of the regular-sized food items.

The confidence in Offer’s voice gives you the impression that you have been living a hard life so far if you do not own this product. How have you slaved away with simple cutting tools? Knives are such antiquated utensils. This is the 21^st century; we have more complicated, intricate products that will do the job better and faster … or so the infomercial claims.

Somehow it’s not surprising that this is yet another product that has varying reviews that do not always go with what Mr. Pitchman says, no matter how exuberantly he gestures.

An article on the Popular Mechanics magazine website analyzed the usability of the Slap Chop in 2009. The author, Harry Sawyers, tested it out on several different varieties of food — vegetables, nuts, and Oreos, all with varying consistencies.

He found that while the Slap Chop worked wonders on slicing up nuts and Oreos, it hit a snag with vegetables. The commercial boasts that a Slap Chop user will be able to chop an onion with the peel still attached, but when this was tested, it was not so. Sawyers attempted this only to end up with bits of peel along with the bits of onion — not the most appetizing concept.

 He also found that the Slap Chop blade would easily get caught within an onion or a potato, or denser vegetables in general. You then would have inconsistently-sized pieces of food due to the technical problems with the Slap Chop’s execution.

Consumersearch.com confirms these problems, adding tomatoes to the list of un-Slap-Choppable foods. Amazon customers describe the product as “cheap” due to its lack of durability and unimpressive cutting abilities.

So according to all these customer reviews, the Slap Chop is, for the most part, not worth the money. Sometimes simpler is better, and complex contraptions can make life more difficult than it needs to be. Just use a knife if you’d like to slice up vegetables and other foods.

The Slap Chop is one of those products that I wish would actually work. Granted, I didn’t actually test it out myself, but just a quick skim of the existing reviews leaves me pessimistic of its usability. The concept is a clever one, and it looks like it would indeed be an asset to someone’s kitchen if they made use of it. Unfortunately, it’s just a mere idea, a promise of a more durable, more slappable cooking product.