You'd think the laundry detergent companies would learn after putting a teddy bear on the bottle, but no. kids are still eating--and getting sick from and even maybe dying from--Tide detergent pods, which look like shiny candy, and [used to] come in a clear, snack-friendly tub. [We have Tide pods in the cupboard right now, in fact, but they're in a new opaque, slightly-harder-to-open container.]
A 7-mo kid in Florida died after ingesting a detergent pod, though it seems to have been an off-brand, and frankly, I wonder how a 7-month-old gets his hands on a detergent pod in the first place. [Whaddyaknow, that story sounds more complicated.]
Anyway, even though it'll kill my dream of Kickstarting a collection of little white, orange & blue swirly silicone teething toys, I think we can all agree that it's important to keep highly concentrated, toxic household chemicals out of our children.
The grandmother of one Tide-poisoned toddler has a petition going on Change.org, and they pitched it to Daddy Types to promote to you. I'm not that thrilled with how change.org micropimps you out to their colleagues in the Political Opinion Industrial Complex, though, so if you want the petition link, you can find it in the consumerist post mentioned below.
But just wait till that Kickstarter happens, and I'm sure I'll change my email cross-promo niche targeting social media stalking tune.
Grandmother Of Poisoned Boy Asks Procter & Gamble To Stop Making Tide Pods Look Like Delicious Candy [consumerist]
Meet Change.org, the Google of Modern Politics [wired]
I've always found these pods to be one of the more extreme examples of "single serving" living (as highlighted in Fight Club). Although now "single serving" might be a little insensitive given the subject of this post.
RIGHT. I imagine some Northwestern MBA in Cincinnati with a poorly performing forecast model cooking these things up after focus groups revealed people use varying amounts of soap when they do the laundry.
The irony is that detergent pods were intended to be a value-added product to increase margins over traditional detergent formats, but they completely backfired. Detergent sales are down industry-wide, because it turns out that most people used far more detergent than necessary when they had to measure it for themselves:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323916304578400521297972496.html
I wouldn't be surprised if the detergent manufacturers quietly begged the government to ban pods.