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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 Grishnakh on Wednesday January 31 2018, @10:08PM
Don't conflate eating Tide Pods with trying MJ.
I'm sorry that wasn't more obvious, but I wasn't conflating these at all, I was just commenting that none of my friends (AFAICT) were drug users, and years later, I'd guess that one of them is probably a MJ user, which is (as you said) relatively harmless, and not at all like other street drugs that are very destructive.
You are correct though, I don't think kids in my day would do anything remotely that stupid. Not eat chemicals like they're food. Maybe jumping off a bridge into the water, or some other alpha male stunt to get girls attention, but nothing so dramatically stupid.
Yep, me too. The stupidest thing kids in my generation and social class did that I remember was mainly driving poorly.
I don't know how to explain this latest extreme stupidity.
I don't either, but it's pretty apparent to me that kids these days just aren't like kids when I was that age. There's huge differences, such as how I was able to wander around outside for miles with no supervision at under 10 years of age, whereas now that would result in police action, child neglect charges, etc. I have a friend with an 8yo boy and I wouldn't trust that kid to get in out of the rain, much less bike for miles around the neighborhood alone, or go to school by himself, but I was doing just that at his age when my single mother was away at work.