product

"Passing the savings" on to the consumer is great and all, but what really matters is that you're passing the actual product to the consumer. Everyone has had a moment with lying packaging, trick containers and misleading and awful products that ended up being more cardboard and air than anything else. The lengths some manipulative and terrible products will go to is something that feels like it should only exist in cartoons.

In an age where brand recognition means everything, who wouldn't try to associate their products and services with more well-known brands? Sure it's legally dubious and the product itself gets dragged through multiple loopholes before becoming a mangled shadow of itself before emerging on the other side, but it's a way to get noticed. The resulting uncredible off brand and bootleg products are a bit much.

We live in a big world, and not everyone is willing to pay top dollar for "official" merchandise that may or may not be just as good as a knockoff. Yeah, you get a few incomprehensible spellings as well as some terrifying handmade statues of Shrek, but they all make for amazing and ridiculous knockoffs and bootlegs.

There are loads of reasons to have a "not my job" moment. Maybe your boss didn't give you the proper tools. Maybe you had to do twice as much work in half the time. It could be that you seriously don't care. Or it could be that you're just seriously bad at it. For those or any other reasons, we see a whole lot of unprofessional "not my job" moments unleashed onto the world. We are here for it.

Smart business people all around the world have realized that there's money to be made recreating products from well known brands, especially when it's changed just enough to avoid any of those pesky licensing fees. How could that plan go wrong? The results make up some highly absurd off brand and bootleg products.

Because we're human beings, we're entitled to our hyper judgmental rejection of anything new and "improved." Sometimes companies work hard to make their beloved products legitimately cheaper and inferior, especially in the case of Cadbury Eggs. Those used to be great. Now everything is too marked up for its own good. Sometimes things just change with the times, like cars not having CD players anymore, which is inarguably worse. Who the hell wants to buy a digital copy of Hybrid Theory when there's a perfectly good physical copy of it somewhere around here.

After a certain point, price doesn't denote quality or value as much as it just becomes the principle of buying an outrageously overpriced thing. Does a 30,000 dollar melon taste 29,995 dollars better than a 5 dollar melon? We don't know, we haven't tried one. But probably not. For out of touch rich people, spending money seems to become a sort of game, and for any reasonable bystander it's a jaw-dropping game to watch.

People want work done fast, cheap and well. Unfortunately, all three of those are never going to happen at the same time. There are some impressively unprofessional "not my job" moments that slip through when no one's looking. But hey, it's better to get the job done-ish than not done at all, right?

Sparkling water is a decisive topic. Some appreciate a light alternative to juice and soda, and everyone else demands to know where the flavor is. It's hard for many of us to spend money on a product whose selling point is that there's almost nothing in it, and that generates some pretty hilarious complaints. For more twitter stuff, here are funny tweets to give that day a boost.

For such a pointless and suggestive product, anyone who sells the Banana Bunker has to be ready to field a storm of joke questions. Buying stuff online can have its drawbacks, like this guy who just tried to order boxes. You never know what kind of product reviews you might get, like this review for electric knuckles that's a fight for the ages.

It's a skill to make an amazing bootleg or knockoff that's close to the original, but not quite close enough that anyone can do anything about it. Companies don't really have to time and energy to go after every single case of copyright infringement and bootleg behavior, so some really good ones slip through. More alarmingly, sometimes it's hard to see what kind of brand recognition they were going for in the first place.

People are dumb. You don't even need to see any classic facepalm moments of dumbness to know that. The interesting thing is that people are so reliably dumb that it's changed the reality of our world. Laws, warnings, products, industries and many other things exist because of human stupidity.

Are you bored of seeing the same mainstream products, restaurants and entertainment over and over again? Well people are working around the clock to achieve that same brand recognition without having to pay pesky licensing fees. These desperate yet charming knockoff brands put smiles on our faces, even if the products themselves make no sense.

There's something special about seeing a product or thing that you haven't thought about once in 20 years. There's something satisfying about those little "a-ha" moments you get from remembering a toy you used to have, a commercial you saw over and over again or seeing a twitter thread that takes a voyage through being in school in the 90s.