Just when you think your unwelcome uncle has finally packed his suitcase and gone home, not to be seen again, and you allow yourself a sigh of relief… oh my god, he’s back again. This time he is on a book tour, and thanks to the publicity machine that is the news media, you and I are made to revisit all the stuff that made us tire of him in the first place.
Why is it that writing a book (and promoting it) always seems to make a public figure smarter and more honorable than anyone remembered?
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About two-thirds of households in the USA have automatic dishwashers. We have one. Dishwashers save time compared to hand-washing — they say dishwashers also save water and energy, but I can’t say. I do know that manufacturers of dishwasher detergent have removed phosphates from their formulas to comply with state regulations. I also know that our dishes do not get as clean as before.
But this is not about phosphates, or the environment, or the ills of government regulation or the good-old-days when people hand-washed their dishes, by gum. This is about the behavior of one corporation, Procter and Gamble, the people who bring Cascade to your supermarket shelves (as well as Pringles, Crest, Prilosec and Charmin). P&G products cover the food chain, from one end of you to the other.
A few months back, we bought some bottles of Cascade Gel (with the grease-fighting power of Dawn) at our local Sam’s. When it came time to use them, we found a mass of crystals rattling around the bottom. The contents had separated; the product was useless. At first, I took this as a stuff-happens moment. We took the bottles back to Sam’s for a refund.
A few weeks later, we cracked open a new bottle of Cascade Gel. No crystals in this one, but this time it was a very thin concoction, about the consistency of anti-freeze. We got another refund from Sam’s and went back to buying powdered detergent.
Now had I not visited the Cascade website the other day, the issue would have ended right there (instead of right here). Instead, I decided to read some user reviews. Here is one:
And here was the telling response from the P&G representative:
As you can see, the big time tea-drinking representative (from India?) carefully avoids dealing with the customer’s issue. Instead, this “Cascade Team” member decides that the customer’s hard water is the problem. Other customer information is ignored (after all, what do customers know?) If only the customer had selected one of our other fine products (“Action Pacs with Extra Bleach Action”), we wouldn’t be having this little chat!
My bullshit detector was pointing in the red by the second sentence.
The Cascade website gets better and better. One of the “Frequently Asked Questions” just happens to be “Why is my gel product frozen?” Hm, that sounds familiar. Below that we see “How can I de-crystallize my Cascade gel product?” Their answer is so good, I just have to share it:
All this, for a bottle of dishwasher detergent. Dishwasher detergent! You would think it was nuclear waste.
What does this tell you? It tells me several things. First, the product development process at P&G is from the Stone Age (it reminds me of Kodak in the 1980s). How a manufacturer could bring a product to market today that is not robust to usual transportation conditions is astounding. This isn’t a case of one person at P&G not doing his or her homework — this is a corporation that doesn’t have the right process in place to prevent mistakes.
This also says something about quality control at P&G. Even without crystals, how is it that I could buy Cascade “gel” that drains out of the dispenser as soon as I close the door? I assume Cascade is made by the batch, maybe 1000 to 2000 gallons at a time. Does P&G not have a batch testing plan? At Kodak, we tested samples of each batch before coating the chemical on film or paper. Does anyone check batches of Cascade before they go into bottles and out the door?
But what is really disturbing is how P&G tries to cover its manufacturing shortcomings with marketing and public relations. (In 2007, P&G spent more on advertising than any other U.S. company — well over $2 billion.) As evident by their website, they won’t admit quality problems — they spin facts and deflect blame. How can you trust a company that doesn’t listen to its customers? People know when they’re getting the run-around.
When I was a senior chemical-engineering student, I recall that Procter & Gamble was a well-respected company and a choice interview. I think a number of my classmates went to work for them. But P&G still looks very much like a 1970’s company to me. It may have a long history, but it won’t survive to 2020 unless it makes fundamental changes.
This is a shame, because P&G has some 35,000 US employees (twice that number abroad) and no one wants to see another US manufacturing-related job disappear. But really, P&G, this is the 21st Century, for like the last eleven years. Search for tomorrow already.
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As I was working on some photos the other day, I was listening to an archive edition of “This American Life” called “The Invention of Money“. The theme of the show was “money is fiction” — money is only as valuable as we agree it is. When we fail to trust it or recognize its value, the system we have constructed around it falls apart.
The events in Egypt remind me that civilization is like money, an abstraction, not a thing, an agreement among us, not an edifice. Even in the cradle of civilization, the system falls apart when people stop trusting or accepting it.
Contemplating this can make one feel insecure. Maybe that is why the price of gold has risen from about $250 to $1350 per ounce in the last ten years. Some insecure people think gold is the thing we all agree on, forever and ever, and bid up the price accordingly. Good luck to them.
My bet is on the people who want civilization, not chaos. History favors them, slightly.