Shhhh! It’s a secret!
this post was submitted on 11 Apr 2024
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AssholeDesign
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This is a community for designs specifically crafted to make the experience worse for the user. This can be due to greed, apathy, laziness or just downright scumbaggery.
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ok, I snorted.... well played.
Shrinkflation at its finest.
No, this is just the dollar store travel version and they didn't want to resize the bottle. Normal deodorant is more like 3 oz. My spray sure deodorant is 6 oz
That being said it's still a rip off
This makes the most sense actually.
Totally misleading due to the bottle size. I've purchased travel overpriced deodorant and it was a half stick anyway.
But the point of a travel size isn’t the amount of product, but the size of the container. This is beyond stupid, before we even get into the unnecessary plastic waste
I bought a 2 pack of Gel Deodorant recently before flying, put them in my carry on with whatever else I brought. TSA didn't care to check the sizes as it went through the scanner. It might not matter as much as we are told.
I mean... it's not a liquid...
I always do solid deodorant. Never thought about that...
Gel is a liquid.
Gel is a thick liquid.
Gel is a thiquid.
Dayum girl you Thiquid.
Last I saw dynamite was made in gel form. Seems more pertinent than liquid in a way. I actually was going to leave them, my mother convinced me to leave their place and fly home with them. Said to myself I will just chuck them in the trash if they had a problem with it.
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Greedflation
I cant decide if this is mildly infuriating or very infuriating. Wow, the fact someone thought this was a good idea. No, fill the goddamn thing. Nobody needs a quarter amount of deodorant. What a waste of packaging.
I was trying to think of an ergonomic justification, but probably they want to sell x amount of deodorant paste at $y price and to fill the thing and still charge that much would make the stick more expensive than they wanted.
Shitty, thanks capitalism.
Yeah, don't get caught in the trap of trying to defend them lol, it's a waste of time
I hate to spoil a good consciousness raising party but it’s still useful to understand why companies do this stuff:
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raising prices leads to more backlash than anything else
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when costs go up, wholesale prices (per unit of product) must go up to match or the product becomes unprofitable
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redesigning the package to fit the smaller amount of product requires very expensive retooling whereas dialing down the amount of product is basically free
You might say “why do they have to be profitable at all?” But then why would they even bother making the product if they weren’t?
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And possibly trying not to bear the price of retooling the packaging. Was it ever sold in this packaging completely full?
You can see the design they used is the maximum the plunger will go down without changing what might be a patented shape or making the whole thing larger or the top area smaller to shrink the plunger. It's still wasteful and deceptive though.
It's known as shrinkflation. Companies want to make more money. Simply asking the customer for more money is hard because we're all well aware of the price we've been paying for something, plus they have to sit on a shelf next to a competitor who might not have raised their price. So instead most products will reduce what you get instead.
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You get 45 grams according to the package. It's more cost effective for them to just put it in the same packaging as the regular sized and just change the label rather than shut down and change the production line to accommodate the smaller size.
I get that, but from an environmental point of view, this is an absolute travesty.
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And of course the fact this obviously creates the illusion there's more product and therefore can trick customers it's just a happy accident, right?
Well, by a trully, utterly AMAZING coincidence....
Could also be a function thing too. My travel deodorant has an amount that is 3 times smaller and it kinda sucks to hold.
Yes they even have to consider things like accessibility for disabled. It's not all trickery. Not to say shrinkflation isn't a problem I don't want to ruin the circle jerk but not everything fits.
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Looks like the amount you get from buying it at a Dollar Store. I've had a similar issue when I forgot deodorant on vacations in the past.
Real asshole design would have been to use an opaque container so you couldn't see that you were being ripped off.
I just got a new stick of Old Spice, and it's solid red. Wondering how much i'm getting from it now.
Update: happy to say that more than 3/4 of the tube is filled. The rest had protective plastic in it, but i’ll let it slide
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Secret's small enough for a 3-1-1 bag but made to rip you off through shrinkflation.
I use crystal deodorant, and I'm nearing the "end" of what I can actually use, but there's probably another 9 months worth of actual deodorant left (this stuff lasts YEARS).
There's no way to actually remove the last half of it without breaking the dispenser.
Like with yours, they put this in a clear container, so it bothers me every time I use it.
I tried crystal, but even after my body got used to it I still smelled super bad. Now I've been using Native and it works well for me but it's pricey. Everyone's body is different I guess.
The crystal stuff helps me to sweat less, but it did very little for the odour (which is surprising because it's the opposite of what it claims to do)
My routine now is to use the crystal, then put a drop of diluted (skin safe) tea tree oil on a cloth and rub that on my pits.
At first the tea tree oil was just to disguises the odour, but after a few weeks even if I forgot the tea tree one day the odour was much improved. My theory is that the antimicrobial properties of tea tree combined with the crystal have worked together to prevent the bacteria and yeasts that make odour worse.
I like the crystal because I have circulation issues and it causes hyperhidrosis in my peripheries, so I've been able to use it on my hands and feet too. I don't want my hands to smell like deodorant but I do want them to be less wet. It doesn't help the numbness, coldness and blue skin, but it's less embarrassing to just have zombie hands than to have soggy zombie hands.
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Well they are sold by weight so you know what you're getting if you pay attention.
I've switched to spray deodorant, which I'm sure hides just as much shrinkflation but seems more efficient.
The ones I see online are 73 grams in the same container. Where was this purchased? And yes of course they ought to have put it in a squatty travel sized container. But this one is not the standard amount.
The great irony is putting it in a squatty travel sized container is probably more expensive, and doesn't save nearly as much plastic as you would think.
Having to set up an entirely new production line just to make smaller containers, or retooling your existing production, would likely incur a significant cost.
On the plastic front, the overwhelming majority of plastic in something like that deodorant is in the base, lid, and "pusher" system. Making it shorter only removes a small section of the least-plastic-dense portion of the whole thing.
They could make a smaller one, but the only real benefit would be show & portability, and it would probably come at a premium per ounce
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