re: #128 freetoken

For my weekly rant about “flippers” and the industry of “flipping” TV shows…

So I’ve watches several episodes of the HGTV show Desert Flippers and of course the show is all about sending people to Lowe’s, Wayfair, (and the even more evil Home Depot) etc. But in the need to do that the show sells the beauty of Palm Springs (often outside the city limits it appears)… and to sell the mystique of the desert to the parts of the country where it rains the producers constantly put up images of palms.

Now, the female show star keeps calling the palms “trees” (which as I always emphasize, palms are not trees)… but that is not the real issue here.

In almost all cases, the palms are untrimmed, unkempt, and in desperate need of attention.

Apparently no one around the area properly takes care of their palms.

Anyway, untrimmed palms are a health menace - rats nests, other vermine, and eventually the leaves when dried (and quite sharp) fall and can cause damage. At least around here, palms are trimmed regularly to avoid these issues.

Yet the show producers keep pimping the joy of desert living by showing the unkept rats nests.

And the show stars, flipping “experts”, appear unaware of the problems with palms, as they are unaware that the ubiquitous fan palms are weeds and an intrusive imported species.

Around here, flippers are always cutting down real trees and removing real bushes, to put in palms. I find it all quite offensive. It’s an appeal to laziness, on the part of flippers, as they can tell their prospective customers (who are overpaying) that the yard is “maintenance free.”

I’ve always called them palm trees. We have a ton in Las Vegas and some are so incredibly tall and have never ever been trimmed. We’ve had many people killed who tried to trim them from underneath the dead fronds, getting caught under the weight, and smothering to death.