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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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:
raising prices leads to more backlash than anything else
when costs go up, wholesale prices (per unit of product) must go up to match or the product becomes unprofitable
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?
Shame that the record profits companies are having aren't consistent with that "costs going up is what's pushing shrinkflation" theory of yours but are absolutelly consistent with the theory that they're trying to get away with increasing their profit margins by reducing material costs (by using less materials) whilst selling at the same price using tricks to deceive human perception of how much product comes in a package.
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.
Dollar stores
The fact that someone thought this was a good idea is not the problem.
If someone else bought this more than once, and also didn't bother to call the company seven shades of utter cunts on social media, they're the problem
it's a lot easier for a company to change their behavior than it is to get everyone buying deodorant to be on the same page. this is why things like the FDA exist, for example