For Black Friday: Product Fails

 Here are a couple of Facebook posts on product fails I experienced recently.  The first one is about ice packs that you sit on for hemorrhoids when you are literally butt hurt. 

Something irritating on Amazon (almost literally) is I bought a product that's supposed to ice hemorrhoids.  "Just sit on this with your clothes on (definitely don't sit on it naked) and it'll get it cold!"  Well predictably all it does is get your butt cheeks cold.  I look at a couple of reviews on Amazon and people give it 4 or 5 stars while saying that it doesn't work as directed but with some ingenuity they got it to work.  

To me if a product doesn't work as they tell you it's supposed to then it shouldn't get more than 3 stars at most.  Giving a product a rave review when it only worked because you modified it doesn't help people like me who are deciding on the product and scroll through to see it got all these great reviews without actually going through to pick out the details.

I was thinking it's like giving 5 stars to a pickup that claims it can haul 50,000 pounds but actually doesn't unless you go and modify the suspension and bed and tires and whatnot.  Basically the company lied and it only worked when you spent a bunch of time and money to get it to work.  

Anyway, I'm just saying there's a time to be nice and polite but sometimes you need to hold companies responsible for products that don't work as directed.  You're not doing anyone any favors by being "nice" about it.

In a similar vein, people gave 4 or 5 stars to this:

Potato?  Po-tah-to?  Or Avacado?  Or pear?

It says it's a potato.  Sure, potatoes are widely known to be green and have brown stems, right?  I mean, OK, potatoes are green before they're ripe, but do you really believe that's what this is supposed to be?  Come on.  Clearly it's an avocado or pear or some damned thing like that and some company in China put the wrong word on there because they don't know English.

Now this one actually does look like a potato:

I've seen a few other fails like this where these cheap Chinese companies don't proofread the product any more carefully than the description or instructions.  There was a whole line of handbags with "Me" and "Other X-Years-Old" instead of "Other X-Year-Olds."  Yet of course someone will still give it a rave review, probably not even knowing that it's wrong.

This next product fail I experienced the same day as the first one.   It was "AA" batteries that were not exactly AA batteries

Another product fail today:  I got some rechargeable "AA" batteries a couple of months ago.  I had a foaming sanitizer dispenser that needed batteries so I put four of these "AA" batteries in.  But they didn't work and then I found out I couldn't even get them back out.  When I examined a couple of the batteries I still had left and compared them to Energizer batteries, I realized these were slightly wider than actual AA batteries.  Which in a lot of things probably doesn't matter, but in this case it really mattered because the slightly larger "AA" batteries couldn't be retrieved and thus I lost 4 of them and had to throw out the sanitizer dispenser because it doesn't work without batteries.

A problem I've noted on Amazon Vine is these off-brand Chinese companies make batteries that look like AA, AAA, or C batteries but they're actually slightly different and so might not actually work.  Buyer beware.

So as you're out there buy, buy, buying remember to be skeptical and if possible avoid cheap Chinese brands that probably won't last more than a couple of weeks and are very low quality.  There's a lot of junk out there, especially on Amazon.

Another good example of it is in Vine this year they've had a lot of knockoff toys or repackaged toys.  This bundle of Power Rangers mini-figures was especially lame.  On the listing page they don't show any Hasbro branding but when you get them there is Hasbro's logo on the front and you can see where they slapped a label over the original Hasbro packaging on the back.  I got an Iron Man and Captain America 12-inch figure that were both like that as well.

And the thing with all of these is they're basically Five Below or Dollar Tree-quality items.  I mean, shit that's too crappy even for Ollie's to carry.  And with this Power Rangers bundle they were charging $27!  I suppose that's a deal if they sell these at Five Below for $5 each but it's a ripoff for Dollar Tree.  I think the Iron Man and Captain America figures were going for $12 or so when they'd only be $5 at Five Below.  

Probably with the pandemic there was a surplus for these things and so some enterprising people in China figured they'd sell them on their own.  And then put them in Vine figuring dumb Americans (see above) wouldn't know the difference or be too polite to say anything negative.

So, yeah, there's a lot of low-quality junk and among good deals are plenty of bad deals too.  A lot of that's also true about books as well.  As if anyone is buying books today.  lol