Every industry has its sketchy secrets, and once tons of companies realized they could use their popular brand to leverage their loyal customer base into paying more for less, you can find yourself looking at a creme egg going "whhaaaaa???". It's also easy to fall into the nostalgia trap of "remember the better olden days" when that product wasn't much better to start with, but shrinkflation has definitely attacked a variety of products and things from all sides.
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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.
You wouldn't think that cartoonish scams like selling a sandwich with one slim front-facing strip of meat would still exist these days, but for some reason the practice of misleading products is going strong. Here are products designed by monsters that sell something other than advertised, charge people for BS, or have misleading interfaces.
People are pretty great at finding alternate uses for things. Sometimes it's some military invention that gets re-marketed as a household convenience, sometimes it's a reflection of changing times, and sometimes its people realizing it's fun to shoot at each other using a paint-launching logging device. Here are some cool and interesting inventions.
Here are some minor things that seemingly have no upside, and feel like they exist just to make someone angry. Like, who's reading the entire story about someone's vacation in Italy? I just wanna learn how to make pasta sauce. There are a lot of nice things about life, but it's also full of misfortune that intrudes on people's lives as well as manipulative and horrible products.
The world is rife with manipulative and awful products and ads, and it's worth it to point them out when they're clearly unfair. There's wildly misleading labels, sandwiches made to look like they're twice as big as they actually are, and apps that make you pay money to delete them, just to name a few. It makes you start to think this stuff could be designed by the devil.
We've all been woo'd by a good commercial at some point in our lives. Especially when you're a kid, Nerf really makes it look like having a sweet blaster will make you the coolest kid on the street. We've all gone crazy at some point for those ads for laser tag games and frozen drink makers, and many of us never learn and keep making stupid purchases far into our adult years. That said, this isn't always our fault, sometimes products are straight up misleading and manipulative.
Some of the stuff rich people can afford feels like it should be hugely illegal, but some of the other stuff they can afford seems like only something a complete idiot would buy. Who needs a hand carved, perfectly cube shaped ice cube? This stuff must feel like a wicked insult to anyone who realized they grew up poor, and probably results in some really terrible rich kid syndrome.
You may have seen sponsored ads for random doodads in your various feeds from time to time. Since online stores will sell everything and anything, people find themselves seeing ads for stuff that you uh.. normally wouldn't see ads for. Not just sex stuff, but strange products with almost no discernable use, or at least something that seems like a very questionable purchase for 3 dollars. The world of online shopping can be strange, with people dropping creative reviews for stuff like massagers, or funny reviews for just about anything else.
Do you get mad when a sale advertises cheap stuff but the fine print is microscopic? How about a dating app that charges you when you try to delete your account? Or an oven that makes you sign terms and conditions? How about a food delivery service that literally steals the money you tip its employees? These and many other terrible and misleading products designed by monsters can be found in app stores and regular stores all around the globe.
Would you like to pay for a subscription to drinking fountains? How about shoes that you have to charge? Internet of Shit highlights these disappointing marvels of technology and many more in what seems like a rapidly approaching dystopian future of awful products that simultaneously don't work and make life more inconvenient when they do work.
Who sells these? Like, we would be completely surprised if any of these worked at all. At the same time, we mostly feel bad for all the models who got roped into this venture. You can see the bewilderment and disappointment in their eyes. But hey, there are worse gigs out there. For more terrible products that are otherwise useless or misleading, here are 25 awful products designed by monsters
If you didn't grow up with garbage disposals and cheez wiz, you might also think that they aren't real. Also paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for education. Here are some things people were dumbfounded to discover actually do exist in the US of A. For the other way around, here are some culture shocked Americans describing sharing things they didn't realize were so American.
