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1/3 full brand new deodorant
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 11 Apr 2024
558 points (96.5% liked)
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 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.
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.
And possibly trying not to bear the price of retooling the packaging. Was it ever sold in this packaging completely full?