In the era of high economic uncertainty, there is one product that is head and shoulders above the others in the “more for the money” category. Dental floss is a bargain! The top-of-the-line high-quality floss is $3.98 for 100 yards of the stuff. Better yet, you can get good-quality generic floss for less than $2 for the same quantity. That works out to less than 2 cents per twelve inches. Try and find that price when looking for a foot-long hotdog or hoagie!

The days of penny candy may be gone but penny floss (which also sounds like the name of an innocent school girl, or a bad rendition of a misquoted Beatles song) is a product whose time has come! Dentists who have captured every source of the tooth decay market have overlooked this one golden nugget.

Not since my daughter’s third-grade reading assignment included a book on how to make toothpaste for 3 cents per tube have I realized such valuable savings from the dental health department. Eating paste has never been so inexpensive!

When you get right down to it, floss, which is really only wax-covered string, is cheaper by the foot than if you purchased the sting and melted wax over it! How can this be true?

It is simple economics. The vast majority of people across this country, especially in those often-referred-to rural “red states,” don’t know there is even such a thing as a toothbrush, let alone something to put in your mouth without fur on it that promotes better dental hygiene. All you have to do to look for proof of that is watch reruns of “Hee Haw” or the “Beverly Hillbillies.” (In case you are from one of those red states, dental floss is about the same size as the rear end of a thong bathing suit.)

If you can educate the masses on the real value of floss, its stock would skyrocket. Now, don’t tip off dentists to this underdeveloped goldmine. You know what they would do. They’d jack up the price, pocket the enormous profits, buy a few more yachts, and play golf four days a week instead of three. After all, those D.D.S. initials after their name means “deceptive dental system.”

I mean, come on! A little drilling, a little mixing, then they slap the cement in the hole in your face and your bill comes to about the same price as a 42-inch plasma T.V. How coincidental! The next time you’re in the dentist’s office, ask about their home video system, and you can bet they’ll spew off for half an hour about how great it is to have one in every room of their mansion, and in their Porsche too.

The ten minutes of real work in your mouth is stretched out by leaving the room multiple times to make you think their time is more valuable. They do this four or five times with you so they can do the same to four or five other patients simultaneously. They are raking it in!
As the patient, you sit in the office before the appointment for an hour sucking in pain from air that seems to be the temperature of a polar bear’s nose after being stuck in a glacial ice cap. Then they take another hour to solve the problem. Behind your back, while you’re in the dental chair, they are making wall-shadow puppets and giggling with their assistants.

As a result, they collect an hourly rate something akin to Nelson Rockefeller’s worth, or the gross national product of Ecuador. The only way around their cost is to do what the hillbilly-in-laws do. Crank up the still and apply a string to one end of your sore tooth, and the other to the plow horse. Blast the shotgun at Bessie’s rear so she takes off with a jolt. This pops your tooth across the corn field like a youngin’ runnin’ from pa’s shotgun.

Of course, you sit laughing about how painless it was (remember the booze-that is something right popular in the hills). It’s like a rerun of “The Three Stooges Go To The Hills” when dental issues arise.

Given all of that dirty dealing from the dental industry, and how they take advantage of patients’ good natures-not to mention insurance companies (how bad do you have to be to be in one of my columns and deemed worse than an insurance company?)-they can’t have the dental floss market too! It’s time we stood and flew the floss flag of defiance, but please let’s utilize unused floss!

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Giosue’ Santarelli is a prolific political columnist, humor columnist, and feature writer who has been scribbling for nearly 40 years. Visit his humor column website “The Devil’s Advocate” at www.devilsadvocate111.blogspot.com.