SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Teenagers Are Still Eating Tide Pods, But Don't Expect A Product Redesign
If you've never seen it, a Tide Pod looks like a little rounded packet, white with two separate swirls of blue and orange liquid. To be clear, a Tide Pod is laundry detergent heavily concentrated into a single packet, meant to dissolve in water and clean a single load of laundry. But these days, it's a dare — an Internet meme, in which teenagers try to eat Tide Pods as a "challenge." The trend picked up in December, but the pace of poisonings is still getting worse. So far in January alone, poison control centers have received 134 reports of "intentional exposures" to laundry packets, Tide or others. That's compared with 53 cases the American Association of Poison Control Centers reported for all of 2017, mostly involving teenagers.
[...] Designs like this are never willy-nilly, says Chris Livaudais, executive director of the Industrial Designers Society of America. The process starts by studying the habits of a potential user to find ways to make their life better in some way. In this case, the condensed formula does away with a heavy jug and the need for measurement.
[...] The colors are already associated with liquid detergent, Livaudais says. And the swirls "might imply how active the ingredients are and how well it would do the washing job."
Jones says the swirls were indeed a design choice — indicating that the pod brings together three ingredients (cleaning, stain-fighting and brightening, he says). The pod is transparent because customers have told Tide they like to know what they're putting into the wash with their clothes.
Livaudais says industrial designers spend a lot of time mulling best and worst case scenarios for the use of products. But if someone knowingly chooses to misuse them? "That's completely out of our hands," he says.
National Poison Help hotline: 1-800-222-1222.
(Score: 2) by Aiwendil on Wednesday January 31 2018, @04:30PM (3 children)
Fun part is - if enough people pressure them then the vast majority of people would do it. The fear of being the oddball loner is greater than the fear of death with most people.
(Yeah, that expression never made sense to me).
But I guess the interim version is "If enough ads told you to buy something would you?"
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Grishnakh on Wednesday January 31 2018, @06:15PM
If our species is really that stupid, maybe it's better that we go extinct from eating Tide pods.
(Score: 2) by realDonaldTrump on Wednesday January 31 2018, @09:05PM
Advertising can be VERY EXPENSIVE. I didn't want to spend a lot of money on my Presidential Campaign. So I did something very smart. I got the Fake News Media to cover me. And they gave me a lot of NEGATIVE COVERAGE. But my name was out there. I got my name out there. And so many people voted for me, I won OVERWHELMINGLY.
And Procter & Gamble -- the Tide folks -- are doing the same thing. People aren't saying, "oh, don't eat the detergent pods." They're saying "don't eat the TIDE pods." And Procter & Gamble put out their ad, they say "use Tide pods for washing, not eating." And the Fake News Media show it FOR FREE. USA Today, Esquire, and so many more. Very smart! pic.twitter.com/0JnFdhnsWZ [t.co]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 31 2018, @11:23PM
> The fear of being the oddball loner
wait, what?
-- the oddball loner