https://www.today.com/health/thousands-children-risk-eating-laundry-pods-study-finds-1D80274348

Note the date of the article. Stop buying them, and they will stop making them.

A detergent company not having to buy and transport the water (water, weight, space) for the more dilute detergent solutions in regular bottles of detergent and softener is a profit-increasing move, marketed as "convenience," nothing else.

http://fortune.com/2018/01/19/tide-pod-challenge-toxic/

I'm not saying that water conservation and efficiency are "bad," but selling non-diluted chemicals to the general public cannot be a "good" idea.

Especially, if you have young children in or visiting your home, don't buy them.

Presumably you have bleach and disinfectant readily available in America for sale to the public?

Um, non-diluted chemicals, as you call them, have been sold to the public for decades, or centuries in some cases. Dry detergent, drain cleaner, ground coffee, rice, ....

Nor have you shown that it is cheaper to manufacture the pods than it is to ship the water in liquid detergents. I doubt that it is. If the shipping cost of the water were that big a deal, manufacturers would just sell powder detergent. There seems to be plenty of demand for liquid detergent.

Oh, my. Never involved in transportation logistics, were you?

I doubt you ever wrote monthly checks for thousands of dollars for a water bill, either.

And, you express a total ignorance of the ways in which the petroleum market (and byproducts) dominates consumer options.

And you seem blissfully unaware of how and why the switch from paper and glass to plastic occurred.

http://www.supplychainquarterly.com/topics/Logistics/20140311-the-real-impact-of-high-transportation-costs/

See "Shift 2."

To try to turn these economics into a political one is a red herring. Neither side of the aisle desires to turn his company into a bankrupt one.

I concede that my "concentrated chemicals" statement was not qualified. Sales of highly toxic chemicals to the general public usually include boldly marked warnings, not harmless, toy and candy appearances. I think of pestcides, drain cleaners, etc, and none of those are designed to look like either toys or candy, and adults are warned to avoid direct and/or prolonged exposure. Detergent pods have a deceptively harmless appearance.

Other than that, do your own homework.

Marketing profit Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> I concede that my "concentrated chemicals"
> statement was not qualified. Sales of highly
> toxic chemicals to the general public usually
> include boldly marked warnings, not harmless, toy
> and candy appearances. I think of pestcides,
> drain cleaners, etc, and none of those are
> designed to look like either toys or candy, and
> adults are warned to avoid direct and/or prolonged
> exposure. Detergent pods have a deceptively
> harmless appearance.

...and yet the pods packages have warnings of the sort you mention all over them. Not to mention that the drain cleaner package I have at home (safely locked up with the laundry pods!) is brightly colored, appealing to my 2 year-old, and would probably be tried by a child if it wasn't locked up, since my 2 year-old doesn't know how to read the "boldly marked warnings."

Yeah, the pods do look a little like candy. So adults should lock 'em up. Like we do drain cleaner, in its brightly-colored, attractive packaging.

My mom used Tide detergent, the powdered kind, when I was a kid. I don't have any recollection of any peculiar odor associated with it. Now I can tell as soon as I walk into an exam room if a patient's clothing has been laundered with Tide pods (which is still far better than if the patient's clothing hasn't been laundered at all; I probably shouldn't complain so much). Nevertheless, the obvious odor cannot possibly be a good indication.

Drink them instead?

Thank goodness they’re adding a bittering agent to the plastic cover to make them taste awful. Of course, maybe that’s part of the challenge. They need to come up with a non-toxic candy that tastes horrendous. Then kids could try that challenge.

That's what stood out to me, too.

My heavens, if they are putting bittering agents in the pods, I'm going to stop eating them!

I honestly don't get the attraction of using pods for laundry. Do people not know how to estimate and measure out liquid detergent? I do get the switch from powder detergents because they don't always dissolve properly. But liquid detergent has gotten increasingly concentrated and is easy to use.

I don't like that they get to decide how much detergent I get to use. I haven't done the math or even checked the prices of those pods but something that attractive must be more expensive.

Yes, they are more expensive. I got a couple of them with my new clothes washer, so I tried them out. It's not unusual for me to run a large load, so I had a hard time figuring out if I should use one or two of them. Why should I have to even worry about that? They did a good job cleaning my clothes, but then, so does my regular detergent -- to which I returned with the next load.

The attraction is convenience. Nothing to measure, nothing to pour, just toss in a pod and you're done.

I remember when washing your mouth out with soap was a punishment
rather than a challenge.

Yep- I remember that drill. Until our new next door neighbors from Trinidad (he was Texaco's chief pilot) used a hot sauce as a replacement for soap. It was about 5 times stronger than Tabasco sauce. Didn't take us long to figure out not to cuss around our parents anymore.

I personally think some people SHOULD eat the damned things; not children, of course, but consenting adults.

There was a joke that appeared on t-shirts and badges (aka buttons) in the UK about 30 years ago:-

"Drink varnish! It'll kill you, but you'll have a really good finish!"



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/27/2018 10:01PM by matt.

matt Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> There was a joke that appeared on t-shirts and
> badges (aka buttons) in the UK about 30 years
> ago:-
>
> "Drink varnish! It'll kill you, but you'll have a
> really good finish!"

I would love a bumper sticker with that slogan!

Why would you?

The washer does.

The pods are easier to use if you are hauling clothes up and down two flights of stairs in an apartment building to the laundry room. The pods are easier to carry and not heavy like a jug of liquid detergent. On the other hand I am discovering the pods do not always dissolve completely which leaves a messy sticky film on my clothes than I have to pay to re-rinse them. I think I will find a small container to put liquid detergent in and quit using the pods as soon as my current supply is gone.

Yes, a small container for detergent sounds like a reasonable solution. Some detergent brands come in reasonably small containers.

If you're using powdered, pour out what you need and put it into a sock. Empty the sock into the tub, and turn it inside out. For liquid, a small jam jar or something should do the trick.

Gosh, I'm brilliant!

Why should you?

Why would you

readwrite Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Why should you?
>
> Why would you


It's all starting to sound like a Dr. Suess book.

You may like them in a pod.
Eat them! Eat them!
Then meet God.

Hahahahahahah excellent!!!!!

https://pjmedia.com/trending/best-meme-responses-ridiculousness-tide-pod-challenge/

A remark I posted previously was deleted, so I'll try and express this with more tact: eating laundry pods strikes me as a practical application of "natural selection." Step right up for your Darwin awards, boys & girls! (Ooops- Darwin Awards are all posthumous. Silly me.)

Common sense should be enough to know you don't eat laundry soap. Or film it on youtube making people believe you at it . Then dumbass programmed tv kids think it must be challenge to follow along and make their own video in hopes to go viral and make a living from viral videos.

Just get a dog/cat and film them do stupid stuff and post on youtube. They will be on their way to getting a few million views and $50 dollars from Google/youtube.

There are other types of pods that aren't pretty that people can use. I use pods for my dishwasher from Costco. They just look like powdered dishwasher detergent in pods, not bright colors. I only use them because they don't sell their brand of liquid dishwasher detergent now. IF I heard that kids were eating them and I had little kids, I would not be using them.

Myself, I don't measure detergent. I pour some in and not much. I have soft water and my clothes are always very clean. I'm sitting here in a dull yellow sweatshirt that has had stains and they are all gone. I use liquid Tide. I tried Gain for a while and all my clothes smelled like Gain for MONTHS AND MONTHS and I couldn't stand the smell any longer.

My house was baby proof central. I moved in when my twins were 8 months old and everything poisonous was on the top shelf. I still don't use the area underneath my counters in my bathrooms for anything except blankets. My brother drank paint thinner when he was 18 months old. He survived because my older brother poured milk down his throat (learned in scouts) and the doctor said that saved him. I am always extremely careful about keeping kids safe. I have a lock box for my medications.

Now the teenagers, I haven't a clue what the hell they are thinking.