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Are there any common household items or products that you think are designed incredibly poorly? (sh.itjust.works)

submitted 1 day ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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For example, I'm incredibly confused about how you're supposedly to measure liquid laundry detergent with the cap. At least the kind that I have sits on it's side, so if you measure it with the cap it just leaks everywhere and makes a mess.

Or at my parents house they have a bag of captain crunch berries that has a new design, where instead of zipping along the top of the bag like normal, it has a zipper in the front slightly beneath the top. That way when you poor it you can't see what you're doing cuz the bag is in the way. Like what the heck who's idea was that?

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (7 children)

In general, I wish more things would have a common design that manufacturers get to reuse and incrementally improve upon. Take, for example, plastic chairs and office chairs. There's probably a million variations in existence and someone had to model, prototype, and make tooling for each and every one of them. Sure, there's varying price points, design languages, and use cases. But even for the same price point there's at least several thousand chairs with the same overall look and feel. All of that duplicated work and effort, only to make several thousand variations, none of which have a distinct advantage, and each with their own completely solvable problems. Why don't they just pool their efforts and design one example with as few flaws as possible for that overall design and price?

[–] [email protected] -2 points 23 hours ago (1 children)

I agree with you, but I'm not sure how great it would actually be.

I don't know much about it and I suspect others will be along to correct me in a moment, but wasn't this a feature of soviet era communism?

As in, capitalists all compete in a free market to produce the best chair for the lowest price. Communism is more efficient because we just direct a factory to make 2 types of chair, standard and deluxe.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 12 hours ago (3 children)

Capitalists compete to make the most money by convincing customers to pay as much as possible for a product that's as cheap as possible to make. The competition argument works in areas that are white-hot with innovation but can anyone honestly say the office chair of 2025 shows thirty years of innovation over the ones from 1995?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 hour ago

Office chairs, no, but massage chairs have.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 hours ago

I was going to bring up the Herman miller Arron, but that released in 1994!

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