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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 Snow on Wednesday January 31 2018, @04:30PM (6 children)
Why doesn't laundry detergent auto-dispense just like Tim Taylor did in Home Improvement in the 90's. I think that was his only project that actually worked, and it was quite brilliant.
(Score: 2) by Aiwendil on Wednesday January 31 2018, @04:34PM
Can't recall that episode (love the show, but mainly watched it for the awesome neighbour).
But yeah, just getting one of those soap handpumps and add a "press X times for laundy" would be enough. Or just oversize to "a squirt per kg/2lbs".
(I actually do that with my shampoo and conditioner, no more fiddling with slippery bottles, just reach and press and you don't even have to look to know what amount you get)
(Score: 3, Funny) by Freeman on Wednesday January 31 2018, @04:59PM (1 child)
One of them worked?!?!? I must have missed that episode.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 31 2018, @05:37PM
While I couldn't find the exact episode, you can compare the washing machine at the beginning of this clip to the one at 1:03 in to the clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_j0MLelIjkI [youtube.com]
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Wednesday January 31 2018, @05:55PM
I just fixed a simplehuman automatic hand soap dispenser and after seeing how much of a pita it was to clean out the little gear pump i'd hate to have to do it on a washer. Honestly, the bottled liquid is all you need and roughly gauge the amount poured by eye. And I use less than the suggested amount and it still does the job with less soap odor and waste. KISS principal always wins.
And here, I love automation and had a bunch of fun ideas for automation projects around the house. But every time I get halfway through the paper napkin stage I realize the amount of complexity behind the design is no where near worth the time or effort.
(Score: 2) by schad on Wednesday January 31 2018, @08:07PM (1 child)
Because they make their money when people use too much detergent. The packaging is literally designed to make it as difficult as possible to use the correct amount, while still being just barely usable enough not to lose a lawsuit about it. Making it so that the container dispenses the right amount would be contrary to their purpose.
They came up with pods specifically because more people started using the correct amount of detergent. That was reducing their sales and cutting into their profits. But with pods, when you do a small load of, for example, just your gym clothes, you still have to use 1 full pod even though it's way too much. But that doesn't mean that a large load only needs one pod. No, you need two or even three pods for large loads. Of course, even if you go out of your way to make sure you've got exactly the right amount of laundry in each load, each individual pod is still considerably more expensive.
This isn't even a conspiracy theory. They're quite open about it. Well, I say "they" even though I think pretty much all laundry detergent is actually made by the same company, just under different brands.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 31 2018, @08:40PM
If I have a small load, I just eat half the pod.