It's the seventies in Serbian shopping centres

My parents-in-law brought us a very odd present last month. Now it was a very sweet thing to do, and I don't want to look a gift-horse in the mouth, but it was odd. It was a frying pan that you plug in and (seemingly, according to how they used it) put on the floor outside to use. It is all the rage, apparently, in Serbia. Everybody has one. Both G. and I thought it pretty silly (why fry things outside on the floor?), but all the Serbian visitors thought it was the cat's meow, and moreover were convinced that the fried meat really tasted different when cooked in this laborious and orthopedically dangerous way. G and I had a real giggle about this making up advertising slogans: Why fry on the stove when you can fry on the floor in your living room, bedroom, or bathroom? Tired of frying smells being restricted to the kitchen? Well fret no more as with the floor fryer 3000 you can even fry things on the floor of your septic tank! And so on.

But then it dawned on me: this was the equivalent of the Breville Sandwich Toaster, which virtually everbody in Britain owns, but has systematically forgotten. Invariably these devices sit at the back of a cupboard still slightly dirty from the last use in 1986 - you could just never get these things clean. There were also thousands of things like this in Canada - wondrous labour saving devices that didn't really live up to the promises. Somehow they ended up creating more work than they saved, but the most popular devices went through a haitus whereby everybody who owned one and had to justify it by somehow believing that (say) frying things on the floor tasted different/better.

I suppose its natural, since shopping malls are pretty new to Serbia, and as a result they are new to the marketing strategy that places attractive people in shops actively cooking something and demonstrating it to passers by (indeed, we were just in Croatia and there were several of these in the local Konsum). I don't suppose many people in the West fall for this kind of thing any more.

There are other quaint or not-so quaint seventies throw-backs in the Balkans too. The tendency, as I have ranted on about previously, not to wear seat-belts, the fact that so few people have credit cards, a belief that there are no gay people in the country, etc. Perhaps some kind of disco revival wouldn't go amiss. I wonder how you say "Shake your booty" in Serbian...