OK, so I do stupid things from time to time. More so of late, it’s true, but I feel I can blame senescence for that.

Recently I strayed from my usual brand of shampoo. There was nothing wrong with it at all, it was perfectly OK. It’s just that some strange gremlin took over my shopping faculties and made me reach for a an exotic new thing on the supermarket shelf…

“You should try different products” the gremlin said, “Rather than just mindlessly use the same brand over and over…”

“Okey dokey gremlin,” said I, forgetting that gremlins are hardly ever up to any good.

I picked up a bottle of this Palmolive ‘Aromatherapy’ Lavender & Geranium scented stuff. Sounded reasonable. How bad can they get with a bottle of shampoo anyway?

Shampoo Front Shampoo Side

The first time I used it I knew there was something wrong. The bottle was disturbingly thin… it felt kind of like it had already been squeezed in the middle… Erk. So weird.

OK. I guess. Some kind of fancy design thing. Can’t see the point myself. Didn’t they test this with a focus group? Surely someone would have pointed out how clumsy and stupid this design is…

Anyway, I used it for a while and the pre-squeezed thing became more and more irritating. Not only was it unwieldy in the shower and unstable on the bathroom shelf, it was really difficult to reliably measure out a set amount of… uh-oh. Yeah, right, now I get it.

The whole thing is a complete swindle. I looked at the bottle. OK. It’s wide and tall, and looks BIG on the shelf, but the thinness of the container makes the volume of shampoo inside about half what it appears to be. Combine this with the frustrating inability squeeze out just a sufficient amount of the contents and you have a perfect example of ripoff marketing.

I’m sure the Palmolive marketing people think they’re very clever coming up with this idea, but I honestly don’t understand how a company can believe that this is a decent way to treat their customers. Maybe I’m naive, but I like the old fashioned idea that if something is actually any good, people will buy it. This kind of money-grubbing contempt for the folks that keep you in business is shabby.

Personally I think it puts Palmolive in the same Circle of Hell as spammers.