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These people probably exist to the minds of most of us, but I envisage a business thriving on the misery of its customers, as the defects are too subtle to be sure they did it purposely.
Light bulbs which only last a week.
Chocolates with tiny flakes of aluminium foil embedded in them, to react
galvanically with mercury amalgam dental fillings
Potato crisp packets which generate around 100dB of sound when being opened, sold to movie theatre candy bars
Public phone booths which play very loud recorded traffic noise, but only when someone is inside them and has inserted their coins/callcard
Cars with a tiny sound system in the dashboard, which plays a range of intermittent squeaking noises while the car is in motion
www.despair.com
http://st4.yahoo.co...s+cwbb8J+index.html
"If we don't take care of the Customer, maybe they'll stop bugging us" [mwburden]
Evil Freedom Foundation
http://www.halfbake...reedom_20foundation
A reason to design these things? [mwburden, May 04 2001, last modified Oct 21 2004]
Evil Freedom Foundation
http://www.halfbake...reedom_20foundation
A reason to design these things? [egnor, May 04 2001, last modified Oct 05 2004]
Grot
http://www.phill.co.uk/comedy/perrin/
The fictional Grot, a business that sells useless things, is from the classic "Rise and Fall of Reginald Perrin". [Aristotle, May 04 2001, last modified Oct 21 2004]
Jigsaw Puzzle Full Set Confirmation System
http://www.halfbake...nfirmation_20System
Appearently [benfrost] was their first customer [phoenix, Dec 11 2001, last modified Oct 05 2004]
For [lewisgirl]
http://www.statisti...ndinflation/rpi.asp
Office of National Statistics [angel, Dec 12 2001, last modified Oct 21 2004]
What's this got to do with the price of sugar?
http://www.statisti...loads/rpiguides.pdf
this requires acrobat reader. [lewisgirl, Dec 12 2001, last modified Oct 21 2004]
[link]
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Not baked in the subtly ironic sense I intended this to be read. These aren't products contravening your Domestic Trade Practices Act 1968, or whatever your particular government called it. It's products with irritating characteristics which may have a plausibly innocent origin, or just plain old planned, accelerated obsolescence so you'll buy another one. |
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....Public phones that take your money and only give you enough time to say Hel.... Software that won't work on Win NT...... etc etc BAKED BAKED BAKED. A plethora of multi-national companies make our lives a misery and are legally untouchable. |
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[insert MS apps/os barb here]
ISPs which get sucked into bigger ISPs, who in turn change your username so you can't log on to your account. BTW, I apologize for my absence of late. |
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nick_n_uit, give us their names, the bastards. We'll teach them to stick a fork in a Halfbaker. |
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Subaru sedans with shoddy plastic sun visors and heater louvers and odd bits that break off at the touch of a child's hand...shoelaces that dissolve in the rain...wait, that was a sci-fi story. Sorry. |
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I don't fully understand. Planned
obsolesence certainly isn't a new
concept. Deliberately irritating
products for no good reason...
what's the point? |
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I'll spell it out... the idea is a business which does nothing but come up with irritating products deliberately, but makes the defects so subtle that they may just be coincidence. Nothing more or less than that. |
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This _is_ a halfbaked idea. |
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Need any inventors/investors Unabubba? I've got some crunchy gum and a wallet full of singles. |
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Convetional in appearance, this men's underwear is actually ergonomically designed to lodge itself in your butt crack. Possibly the fabric in the centre of the garment is designed to contract when exposed to sweat. Try riding a bike with them or sitting in a particularly stressful meeting with your boss. |
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If this were very carefully orchestrated, the public's aggravation would slowly build until it could no longer be contained. After decades of niggling failures, voided warranties, and breakage, consumers worldwide would rise up and smash their corporate oppressors. With cries of Ayn Rand! Ayn Rand! they would demand quality in all things. Durability! Functionality! Free beer! Bit of a tightrope act to get the level of aggravation right without being lynched, though.
| Dog Ed,
May 07 2001, last modified May 08 2001 |
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"Free Beer!" is what an Uncle of mine would yell to the occasional balloonist floating high over his rural Grocery Store. |
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Your uncle was a cruel man, thumbwax. |
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Or indeed, the producers of many television show, mostly American, which people pay a great deal of money to moan about the quality of. Have you ever heard anyone say B**watch is an entertaining show? (Apart from Hasselhoff that is.) |
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Buckminster Fuller had an idea of a company called "Obnoxico" that specialised in exactly these products, in order to generate consumption in the world economy. |
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http://members.tripod.com/~taodesigns/fuller/fuller81.html
"Obnoxico was designed to exploit the most sentimental weaknesses of humanity. In my theoretical Obnoxico's catalog the number-one item suggested that on the last day that your baby wears diapers you very carefully remove them, repin them empty, and stuff them full of tissue paper in just the shape in which they were when last occupied by your baby. You pack this assembly carefully into a strong corrugated-paperboard container and send it to Obnoxico, which will base- metallize the diapers, then gold- or silver-plate them and send them back to you to be filled with ferns and hung in the back window of your car." |
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He saw it all as a global plot
"As the banking system pleads for more savings-account deposits (so that they can loan your money out to others at interest plus costs) the Obnoxico industry bleeds off an ever-greater percentage of all the potential savings as they are sentimentally or jokingly spent for acrylic toilet seats with dollar bills cast in the transparent plastic material, two teddy bears hugging an alligator, etc. " |
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They could be like the cart people, that sell things from their cart, and they make it look like a good deal, but then, but then, you go to your local 'Spar' and they are selling they same product at half the price, those damn cart people, it's all tehm i tells you, it's all them, |
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Beat me to the link again, Aristotle. |
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(somewhere inside CIA Headquarters, in Langley, Virginia) "UnaBubba's on to us. Contact one of our free-lance assassins." |
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Are These the people who put a 'fat bastards' section in the major stores? |
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Sardine tins fitted with those stupid ******g keys. |
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How about underpricing goods so that they sell out and leaving the tempting adverts up, thus driving customers mad when they go in and ask "Have you any x at that great price?". Or, taking it further, do without any real products altogether and just tell customers they're sold old when they, enticed in by the adverts, enquire. Not sure how money is made here, but I'm not sure the original idea would have great second sales anyway. Anyway, as annoying people is the main purpose, profit isn't a priority. |
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There is no profit motive here, just the satisfaction of seeing people surprised at how badly the products perform. It comes down to the simple fact that much of our comedic entertainment is predicated upon the misfortune of others. |
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[mkirksmith]: Have you noticed how cheap sugar is in supermarkets? It's sold usually at below cost (called a 'loss leader') to entice customers into the store to buy other stuff. |
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[angel], today's spot price for sugar on the London market was UKP138/Ton. *That* is why it's cheap. That's 6.16p / lb. |
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You're being ripped off at the cash register. |
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Yeah, but when you've added legitimate processing, packaging, shipping and display costs, that price has probably quadrupled. Whatever, even if sugar's not the loss-leader of choice these days, the concept exists of tempting customers into a store with some low-priced item, hoping that they'll buy other, higher-margin stuff while they're in there. |
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Is sugar one of the things on the Retail Price Index by which we measure inflation? How does one find out what's on the RPI? |
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Fruit is sold at a loss (or close to cost) in big supermarkets. It's there because it looks good when you enter the supermarket.
Supermarkets get you to walk round the whole shop (and thus be tempted by high-priced items) by frequently changing the position of staple items (bread, eggs, milk, sugar, etc.). |
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Interestingly, in Oz at least, the top five products sold at supermarkets are the ones I would least expect. |
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1. Coca-Cola
2. Cigarettes
3. Cigarettes
4. Cigarettes
5. Cigarettes
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The next five are a little more predictable. Having said that, only 22% of the adult population are smokers. $10,000 fines for retailers selling tobacco products to minors, per offence. |
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6. Milk
7. Cigarettes
8. Bread
9. Cigarettes
10. Bread |
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thanks angel - I found it too.
hippo, my supermarket has changed only the location of eggs, once, in the three years I've been going there. They made the fruit and veg a bit of a maze though - all the aisles are across the direction you want to be going. |
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That thing with the aisles is obviously to make to pass stuff that might tempt you, but it also serves to impede escaping shoplifters. |
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Right from the start I thougt - in telecommunications they already are doing a pretty good job at dissatisfying customers. I have worked in such companies and it is amazing in how many ways you can dissastify customers with poor product and instant service changes. Specifically ISP's have overloaded call centers, crappy billing, the World Wide Wait, etc. So why not rename existing companies to what they really deliver? |
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Oh, you mean like "The Horse Manure Computer Service Co." ? |
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oooh that's good. My dad's on btopenworld at home. Evil Cackle. (((a couple of bakers had the unfortunate pleasure of getting a reply-all (to my birthday party invite) from pops this morning, for which I will continue to apologise))) |
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I like this idea lots. But thats coz I love playing practical jokes on people, which is what this essentially is. |
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mkirksmith: Baked in Estate Agents across the land. |
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Remember the Pocket Fisherman? |
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