The Booming Vuvuzela Business

If you've been watching the World Cup you most likely have noticed that angry swarm of bees present at every match. Unlike at that Padres game, these are actually plastic horns.

The invention of them is disputed as ranging from Mexico to South Africa on the article devoted to the horn from hell on Wikipedia, but official credit is generally given to South African Freddie Maake and the South African company, Masincedane Sport, that first mass produced the current version many love to hate.

The horns have overshadowed the games themselves, being so loud that players, match officials, fans, broadcasters, sportswriters and people watching at home have all complained of them. LG, an electronics manufacturer, has even gone as far as instructing owners of its HDTVs on how to watch the games with a setting that filters out the vuvuzelas in the background. For fans not fortunate enough to have an LG HDTV, broadcasters such as ABC/ESPN, BBC, CANAL+ and Sky Deutschland have begun to completely filter out or tone down the sound of the annoying plastic misery machines.

To be fair, FIFA and many others have defended the horns as well. FIFA has even begun training referees with vuvuzela noise included. The horns have now jumped across the pond and are showing up at baseball games, including Red Sox and Marlins games, and other events around the world. The Yankees have banned the horn from Yankee Stadium after a fan brought one to a game against the Phillies last week.

Amid all the protest and controversy there is a lot of money to be made with these horns. They sell for around $7 or $8 online and come in a variety of colors. The money is not in that they have sold them just to people at the matches, but that they are now selling worldwide. The original company that manufactured them has gone big time, contracting out to many factories in China like all big shots do to manufacture them at a fraction of the cost and ship them to every corner of the earth. Eventually, these people in the vuvuzela business hope, bees will feel emasculated and start mooing like cows. In fact, there were upwards of 200,000 vuvuzelas being produced per factory in some of the factories ran by the Chinese haters of sanity that produce them. Currently, the factories are pushing out about 20,000 a day in larger operations.

Over a million of these horns have been sold already, according to the AP. Expect many more millions to be sold and expect many more people to begin hating sports because of them. If they end up at Yankee-Red Sox games, Sox fans will long for the days of the "1918" chant because at least it had some humorous value. The only purpose vuvuzelas serve, aside from annoying humans and bees, is to make money.

According to this report, there is even a church trying to muscle in on the vuvuzela cash flow. Hopefully this scourge will end sooner than later.