Given this blog's prominent position as one of the internet's foremost tastemakers, I am well aware of and careful with the great amount of cultural influence it wields. As I recall Cliff Robertson once said in some movie "with great power comes great responsibility". So whether it be presidents (or at least movies about presidents) or cereal brands, my readers expect a certain high standard of integrity and genuineness that comes with my recommendations or criticisms; my cheers and jeers if you will. With that in mind, I just want to give a quick little shout out to these new Tide Pods.
Hailed by Tide as the greatest innovation in laundry in decades, these newfangled individual use detergent pods were bought for the house mostly as a novelty; also they might have been on sale. I didn't have any expectations at all. For me concerns about the laundry occupy a pretty low slot in my daily thoughts; somewhere between wondering about the unusually slow speed of releases of "Family Matters" seasons on DVD and worrying about rising threat of Africanized killer bees from South America. Like most people I'm basically content with whatever random, colorful detergent with a monosyllabic brand name that manages to clean the everyday stains out of my shirts without giving me some sort of chemical rash.
The marketers are really trying to sell people on the convenience factor of just throwing in an individually packaged pod instead of dealing with the supposed hassle of powders and liquids and measuring cups, but really I don't think that's a big deal. I mean what is this saving like an extra minute a week? Now we can do all that traveling? Also, if you're really having a difficult time measuring out and adding detergents, to reference Jerry Seinfeld, maybe laundry isn't your biggest problem right now.
What really impressed me and drove me to write this silly post was the performance. I have to say I actually noticed that my laundry has been coming out smelling a lot nicer since we started popping pods. It must be from one of the two bright pockets of chemical goo along side the white powder core. The smell is sort of a fake kind of nice, like those air fresheners that are supposed to simulate the mythical scent of linen sheets on a wire, but I like it. For me fake clean is cleaner than real clean. True story, after slipping into my freshly washed sheets and comforter for the night, I was actually so distracted by the overwhelmingly pleasant smell that I had trouble falling asleep (this could quite well be the most first of first world problems).
I don't know if any of the other laundry packet detergents are just as fragrant or as effective or if you can get the same effect by throwing in one of those similar dish washing packets into your washing machine, but for me I noticed a difference.
One additional potential "benefit" of the pods is that that it in addition to cleaning performance and convenience the product also appears to have been aggressively designed to poison children by fooling them into thinking it's candy (seriously why don't they just put a toy inside to further increase the confusion). So I suppose if you're some sort of child hating monster you can consider it as an additional plus. I can go either way.
