Asklemmy

Everyone seems to have a cup plunger made for sinks next to their toilet instead of a toilet plunger near their toilet.

A toilet plunger has flanges:

I have seen this plunger close to zero times when visiting people and using their bathroom.

A lot of OTC meds that are in boxes have annoying packaging where you have to peel off the little paper before you can push the pill through the wrapping. The paper doesn't always like to peel off properly and it makes it harder to get the pill out of the packaging.

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?

I've always thought that most toilet paper holders are over engineered. You don't need a little springy rod between 2 posts, you just need an L-shaped bar with the short end screwed to the wall and maybe a little knob on the end of the long side to keep the roll from sliding off. And it's not that the spring style is especially difficult to use or prone to failure or anything, it just seems like a no-brainer to me to use a one-piece holder with no moving parts instead of one that has at least 4 parts (the base, 2 halves of the roller, and a spring) I'm seeing more of that style around these days, which I appreciate.

Stove vent hoods that don't actually vent outside are fucking stupid. My over the range microwave basically just takes smoke from my stove and blows it back out over my head almost directly at the smoke detector.

I've frequently run into shelves, mounting brackets, etc. that seem to totally disregard stud spacing. We got one of those fancy Samsung frame TV's a while back, to get it to sit so flush to the wall it has its own special mounting brackets, 2 little plates with sort of a modified keyhole slot that you slot 2 little knobs on the back of the TV into. It's actually not a half bad way to mount a TV, probably one of the easier TV wall mounts I've ever personally used, the tv itself is actually pretty damn lightweight (because they moved all the heavy electronics into a separate box you need to hide somewhere) but still I wanted to make sure my fancy TV wouldn't fall off the wall, so I wanted to mount it to the studs, but of course the spacing of the brackets doesn't allow that option. I was able to bolt one side a stud but I had to get some toggle bolts for the other side. I'm pretty sure the whole TV is well within the rated weight capacity of one of those toggle bolts in drywall, let alone 2 in drywall and 2 in a stud, but still, it feels like a dumb design choice. (It's possible that other sizes or newer models do allow for mounting entirely to studs, the size and model I got didn't)

I helped a friend replace the wax ring on his toilet recently with one of the newer style rubber gaskets, which as it turns out made the toilet sit imperceptibly higher, which meant that the bolts holding it down were no longer quite long enough to screw the nut onto to tighten it down. With a quick trip to ace hardware and a minute perusing my options, I settled on some Danco zero cut bolts, and I definitely think that is a far superior design to the standard bolts that are probably holding down damn-near every toilet you've ever used.

On the subject of toilets, I can't think of any particularly good reason for the tank to be a separate piece from the rest of the throne like on most toilets. The gasket and bolts there just add more places for something to start leaking. It's probably an ease of manufacturing thing, but we have the technology to make one piece toilets now, the two piece style should be obsolete.

Overtime, our kitchen knives. Knives need to be thin, as thinner knives cut through ingredients more easily. Today's knives are designed instead to be marketed. Something incredibly thick, and sturdy, to make it feel "premium", when all its doing is tiring you out, since using a heavy knife gets exhausting, especially when its so thick it wedges in ingredients.

Vintage European knives are slim, and almost petite, because they knew how to make a good knife, in the same manner japanese knives are ground extremely thin, sometimes thinner than a postcard.

I had some plastic clothes-pins that became severely degraded from uv sunlight.

light bulbs that die too often.

those pots and sauce pans that use a screw to connect the handle. the screw head generally places inside the pot and will get to all your food.

chopping boards. plastic chopping boards enhance your meals with microplastic. composite wood enhances your food with bacteria lodged in-between wood pieces. bamboo -- too thin and ends up similar to composite.

Keyboards are the obvious one.
The standard keyboard layout is designed to slow down typing, because typing too fast lead to the arms of a typewriter hitting each other.
And why is one of the most accessible large keys fucking Capslock?
And why is there empty space around the cursor keys, so you have to use WASD as a workaround in games?
I'm not even talking about the menu key, Windows key and Copilot key.

The other one are bicycles. An aerodynamic riding position is uncomfortable for most people, so is the saddle, and when you break too hard, you fly head-first into whatever you were trying to avoid. Recumbent bicycles are better in almost every way.

Condoms should roll on either direction.

NOT FUCKING ACCEPTABLE WE ARE BETTER THAN THIS.

🚫

To be fair, most are. At the end of the day, today's economy makes it far more profitable to choose either extremely cheap or extremely expensive, making good, lasting, but not perfect products is just not what consumers seem to want. People eother want something cheap that works okay, or something really well made that justifies the price.

I feel like 99% of products I interact with get me frustrated with their simple-to-fix design flaws.

But as for your question: fucking toothpaste containers! Could you make a more frustrating and intentionally bad design?? Why is it that if I cut them open I can get like another few days to a week of brushing? Why not put tooth paste in a jar with a little spoon? Or an opening that is small so that the amount that is left after squeezing your best, is truly insignificant? Why. Must. I. Suffer?

Those ridiculous new caps on plastic bottles are awful. They only lead to wastage as it's difficult for most people to reseal them properly and anything carbonated gets wasted. Tagging the lid to the bottle is not a world-saving solution for recycling.

Chairs and tables. Why do I have to squeeze my thighs between the chair and the dinner table and then bend down awkwardly when I eat to not splatter all over? Why are chairs so high and tables so low? Just put the table higher so the food is closer to my mouth and why do we even need chairs anyway?

Milk cartons suck now. In the 90s, we could fold and push to open. Why do we need scissors to open them now? Oh and half of them now have a plastic lid in the middle so you can't even pour out the last drops anymore.

The new caps they're putting on plastic bottles are awful. Make it very hard to put back on properly and we've have a few incidents with them looking on but they actually cross threaded and leaked. I just rip them off now.

Also, why is the glue on cereal boxes so damn strong now? I end up tearing the box more often than not these days and that never used to be the case.