Timeshares in Popular Culture

I remember the first time I ever heard the word "timeshare" uttered. It wasn't on television, but by a friend of mine. We were both in fifth grade at the time. Apparently his parents had owned a timeshare in Palm Springs for several years. He brought it up when we had been scheming a practical location for a joint vacation between our families. "So, could we use the Palm Springs timeshare?" I asked.

"Probably not," he said, scratching his head.

In the early 90s timeshares were enjoying a golden age in America, although this is also the time period where they became closely associated with the scams that persist in the industry to this day. It was an entirely foreign concept to my friends and I, despite living in a burgeoning city in suburban California and thus being somewhat better acquainted with real estate and property terms than most kids (I remember getting excited when an empty lot across town had been zoned for commercial activity -- they wound up building a mall there 5 years later). Today it's a different story. Most people have at least heard a joke about, or seen a commercial for, or received a postcard invitation from a timeshare company. The word has become more or less embedded within popular culture.

Television, in its perpetual quest for easily identifiable material, was quick to pick up on the trend -- timeshares have been spoofed in just about every long-running sitcom from the late 90s on. Several of the families from South Park once attended a ridiculous timeshare presentation in Aspen. Doug and Carrie from "The King of Queens" once had an episode-long argument regarding the potential purchase of a timeshare. Characters from "King of the Hill" nearly got suckered into a Mexican timeshare scam. And Peter and Lois, from "Family Guy," perfectly illustrated the bait-and-switch sales tactic so common in timesharing today at the start of one of their misadventures.

Peter and Lois receive a postcard mailer claiming that they've won a free boat -- all they need to do is sit through a timeshare presentation to retrieve it. They attend the presentation with several of their friends, all of whom are given the following option: take the boat, OR the contents of a mystery box.

Lois, the intelligent consumer that she is, chooses the boat immediately, but Peter isn't sure. The box could hold ANYTHING, he says. After some hilarious deliberating Peter finally chooses the mystery box, which turns out to contain tickets to a cheap comedy club -- understandably disappointing Lois (at least Peter didn't actually BUY the timeshare, though).

The illustration in this episode isn't quite accurate -- after all, other attendees of the presentation walk out with free boats, which is hard to believe. But the spirit of timeshare sales is there, and it's spot-on. Too often the choice is already made for consumers, and instead of receiving the high-priced entertainment (the "boat") they've been promised, they're treated poorly and handed a "mystery box" of a timeshare no one is even able to open. And whether or not they use that mystery box, of course they still owe the timeshare company all the relevant fees, year after year.

Timeshare has become a stock scam on TV, but it's still a billion dollar industry. For once popular culture is right -- and it would probably be better to avoid both the boat and the mystery box altogether.