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Comment by nerdponx | Hacker News Reader

Don't use the damn pouches! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_rBO8neWw04

A. Watch his follow up video. Where he talks about all he got wrong.

B. I recently switched to a more “natural” SevenGenerations pouch and holy crap it’s been excellent.

C. You can not buy anything but pods at two of my grocery stores. You need to go to Walmart near me to find any straight powder. Market has spoken right or wrong.

We use dissolvable tablets (from Blueland) with all "natural" ingredients; can't vouch for how true the natural claim is, but we're happy with them and it's one way to reduce plastic; we also get their dissolvable tablets for hand soap, all purpose cleaners, glass cleaner, etc.

I tried the dishwasher tablets and felt like it didn’t clean the dishes as well. We been using the hand soap and other cleaners and I’m never going back on those. Maybe I need to give the dishwasher tabs a try again.

Maybe it depends on the dishwasher. We used them in our previous house and weren't as impressed with them but then moved and our new dishwasher works very well with them.

Plenty of things that are “all natural” will kill you in the blink of an eye

Like arsenic

Or cyanide, cobra venom, polonium, or lead.

Also lions.

I always give my dishes a quick rinse to wash off any excess lions.

"Wash off any excess lions" without even mentioning to check for alkali metals first.

You're going to kill some poor soul trying to clean all the baked-in francium and lions off their crockery.

Shame on you.

I'll try to do better.

You missed the tigers and bears.

What he got wrong was... You might want to use less detergent to avoid residues.

The pouches are still pointless.

We switched and it almost completely solved our "dishes not getting cleaned properly" problem.

Same.

Switching to powder has done a lot for us in getting dishes cleaner, and we can dial in the amount of powder needed for the particular soil level of a load.

The fact that it's cheaper per load, and the box fits more neatly under the sink are added benefits.

And if your hands are slightly damp, the cardboard box for the powder doesn't stick to your fingers, where a dissolvable membrane would start dissolving on you.

> Market has spoken right or wrong.

I call BS on this. The non-pouch detergents disappeared, that much I know. I strongly doubt people had stopped buying gel and powder. I suspect that some bright bulb at Johnson & Johnson or wherever did the math and realized that pouch margins were higher than gel and powder margins.

The marketing side of the market has spoken.

Fixed serving sizes force over-use. Lots of included water means extra volume and weight (perceived value) on the shelf. While powders allow measured use, and reduce turnover.

I buy 20lb boxes of cheap powder and they last for months. Hot water just doesn’t need that much help if you put some in the pre-wash too.

> I buy 20lb boxes of cheap powder and they last for months.

...is this a commercial kitchen? 20lb is like two loads a day for a year.

Depends on the household size and habits. Daily cooking for 4 or 5 people and sharing two other meals and the occasional baking can quickly fill up the dish washer, especially in those growing phases when the kids are eating like there is no tomorrow ;-)

20 years ago in my country overuse of powder detergents was well known by all the manufacturers; this is when fixed serving sizes were developed as a way to contain the problem and they are also considered more convenient by most consumers. I was working in one of these companies at that time, so I know the subject pretty well.

I would have assumed that overuse was a desirable outcome for the manufacturer.

If you put less detergent in the packs, they are cheaper per package. This is good, because that means the price can stay the same for more profit.

There were a couple of very undesired side-effects that manufacturers hate because it was making the consumers angry:

1. Burning the color of clothes.

2. Irritating the skin (hand-was was very common, it still has some use cases even today).

Also there was a move around 2003-2004 to increase the concentration of automatic washer detergents, that was meant to decrease the transportation cost for manufacturers, but overuse was even riskier. I know it was done, somewhere before 2005 when I left that area of business, part of the solution was a big marketing campaign, another part was switching to liquid detergent with a measuring cup, also including a measuring cup in the package with the larger sizes. I don't know what happened later.

I'll grant that the pods are often reasonably sized. My main complaint is that they don't provide any detergent to the pre-wash cycle. That can leave a lot of oil for the main wash to process.

> The non-pouch detergents disappeared

? I still see them everywhere. And a quick Amazon search for “cascade complete” lists gel as the first result and powder as the third.

Yea, I didn’t list Amazon. I said in the stores near me. Last I checked, Amazon’s thing was to have everything.

The local supermarkets all stock literally one or two boxes on the shelf at a time, even though I know they have more in the back because as soon as I buy one it's put back on the shelf the next day. Something really funny is going on, I wouldn't be surprised if they had some contractual arrangement to artificially limit the amount that appeared in stock, to make it seem less appealing.

As someone who has worked in a grocery store I think you're reading way too much into it. They have priorities when stocking shelves but I think conspiracies by Big Detergent to get you to buy tide pods are low on the list.

What's going on is that grocery stores have notoriously horrible pay, and nobody wants to work there.

TIL American dishwashers expect hot water input. This seems... bad?

It's only bad if the hot water takes a long time to get hot, which used to be much more problems than it is in newer systems.

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