Crappy Products for Sale

There are little things in the world that peeve me, things that shouldn't but do. Not because I need to toughen up and take things in stride better, but rather because those responsible for them should and could do better. For example:

--Whenever I buy a pack of those cheap Bic ball point pens, I am satisfied. I take any pen out of the pack, uncap it, and from the start the ink flows out of the pen onto the paper. But any other brand, including the vaunted PaperMate (which all of the stores around me stock up on instead of Bic) has lousy pens that won't produce ink. This is a simple quality-control situation that the company should have taken care of during production. It's not a matter of me preferring their product less than Bic: I simply can't use their product at all, period!

--The same goes for clear adhesive tape. Scotch is the only brand that "gets it". For every other brand I've tried, the tape won't tear off cleanly, stretching instead of breaking. Or, the tape will begin to tear in such a way that it becomes fragmented around the roll, thus making the entire roll completely useless.

--Or how about those spiral notebooks that have their pages perforated for "easy" removal? After writing several pages of material in one such notebook recently, I tried to remove them so that I could reorganize them in another notebook. But about halfway down the pages, the perforation briefly ended, causing the paper to tear. How frustrating, and ultimately unnecessary!

No, I don't get it. In each of the above examples, I am not talking about products that are cheaper because they have less frills than a more expensive variety. Instead, these products are manufactured to be crappy and then sold as something that does not live up to its purported function. And sometimes they aren't even the "bargain" brands! But just the same, just because a product may be relatively inexpensive, that shouldn't grant its producer the license to sell something that in very basic ways simply doesn't work.

No wonder that many folks are edgy about purchasing generic prescription medicine. And what about the privatization of our space program? Sure hope we don't end up with any off-brand rockets...

KA-BOOM!