No 2018 ‘Hater’s Guide To Williams-Sonoma Catalog’: Here’s Why

If you’ve been searching and searching the interwebs for Drew Magary’s uproariously funny “Hater’s Guide To The Williams-Sonoma Catalog,” you won’t find it this year. The Deadspin blogger was injured in an accident and is recuperating, according to the news and sports blogging site.

Woe! Magary’s snarky take on consumerism has been a holiday staple for many since it debuted in 2012. In it, Magary has regularly disabused us of the notion we need things like gold-monogrammed cocktail glasses, snowman marshmallow floaters and the like.

He has previously described San Francisco-based Williams-Sonoma as the “talisman of yuppie waste designed to lure in aspirational marks who have already ceded to living the bulk of their lives in monstrous, crippling debt.”

In a post earlier this month, Deadspin said Magary, a “beloved voice” of the site had been “moved to the injured reserve list,” but was “doing well under the circumstances.”

“We miss his randomly capitalized exuberant tweets and his Hater’s Guide To The Williams-Sonoma Catalog even more than you do, but we want to allow him the time he needs to recover without worrying about blogs, and the privacy to do so without us haranguing him,” Deadspin wrote. “We love him and are rooting for him, and we can’t wait to announce that he’s been designated to return. Feel free to use the comments to send him good thoughts and Kirk Cousins GIFs.”

If you haven’t been keeping up, Cousins signed a three-year, $84 million contract with the Vikings last spring. Deadspin described Magary as an “irredeemable Vikings fan.”

For those who are missing it, here are five questions or takeaways from the 2017 Hater’s Guide to the Williams-Sonoma Catalog:

1. Just who is Williams-Sonoma targeting with Boska Fondue Sets? “You listen to me, Williams-Sonoma: There will NEVER be a fondueassaince. Ever. You can bring back a lot of things from the 1980s—tube tops, keyboards, a horrifying governmental indifference to the poor — but the fondue STAYS,” Magary wrote.

2. If you want to stab a piece of fruit, do you really need Pineapple Cocktail Picks? “Not to do the sticker shock routine with you yet again, but selling a half-dozen toothpicks for 50 bucks takes balls the size of pineapples,” Magary observed, adding: “This is lunacy. I enjoy speared fruit as much as the next cocktail party guest, but you don’t have to wow me. Gimme one of those little plastic swords and I’m perfectly content. I will absolutely stage tiny swordfights with my brother using those little things. That’s garnish enough. You don’t need to go the full Tiffany with these.”

3. What’s up with Latke Starters? “Is this a thing? Do people generally need latke starters? I’m making a potato pancake, not a tub of yogurt ….” Magary chided. “And please note how casually they toss out the ‘Simply add grated potatoes.’ You ever grate a potato? It SUCKS. The potato gets all slippery and there’s that weird film of foamy Santorum dirt on it. …”

4. Six Months of Cheese: Are you sure, Williams-Sonoma? “I like cheese as much as the next heart attack candidate but when I pay $300 for six months of cheese, that better amount to 9,000 pounds of cheese,” Magary wrote. “I want a truck parked outside and tubes of liquid cheddar on tap in my basement. If you’re just sending me a stupid cheese platter every four weeks, that’s not acceptable to me. That is not six TRUE months of cheese. To me, six months of cheese means I can strip naked and tape the windows shut and live off that cheese for half the year, shutting myself in like a heroin addict. …”

5. What would possess anyone to spend $3,699.95 for a coffee machine, even if it is a $1,200 savings? Magary said at that price, the coffee machine better dispense more than coffee — bitcoins, for example — and it better turn him into Spider-Man at top brew strength. “And not only do the good folks at W-S presume you have a Tesla down payment to spend on a coffeemaker, but they routinely assume that you have more available space on your countertop than the totality of the Chesapeake Bay coastline,” he wrote.

There’s so much more, and some of it is a little randy for our audience, so be sure to go to Deadspin to read the entire 2017 Hater’s Guide to the Williams-Sonoma Catalog.

Photo by David Allen/Patch