You know those apple slicer things that look like a wagon wheel pattern blade with a circle in the middle so you can core it and slice it in one swoop? We found one for watermelons. No shit. In hindsight, I'm guessing it was supposed to be more of a funny novelty than something actually used, but... we used it...
It made it about half an inch into the melon, then shattered like it was some kind of ACME explosion. Bits of plastic went EVERYWHERE, my melon was now wearing a crown of blades, and I was just standing there with a handle still in each hand trying to process wtf just happened, like Wile-E-Coyote still holding the steering wheel of the car that just blew up around him looking straight at the camera like "well that just fucking happened..."
0/10
Bargain store potato knives with plastic hilts have only 2cm of blade inside.
haha love this, i had something similar but less explosive with a metal temu garlic press... it completely bent out of shape on the first garlic cloves i used it on hahaha
Plastic clothes pins that degraded in the sunlight, turned into plastic powder.
My mom always bought those, granted they last close to a year but damn the cheap bamboo ones cost practically the same and last forever
I bought a cheap scientific calculator for math class. When I tried to multiply .5 by .5 it gave a long irrational number instead of .25. then I had to try to explain to the store clerk why that was wrong before they would accept the return
Ah floating point math. Works fine for 90% of use cases, until it doesn't.
Better calculators just use floating point math with a few tricks on top to pretend it isn't floating point math.
Weirdly though it wasn't remotely close to the right answer so I don't think it was floating point malarkey. I always assumed some defect but I guess we'll never know.now I wish I had kept it so I could have sent it to Matt Parker for his calculator reviews
First gen Pentium seems like it would be overkill for a scientific calculator but I guess they had to offload those chips somehow.
The ti-84 plus is based on the zilog z80. From 1976. The calculator is still being made, and still costs $100.
This reminds me of a story with an old high school maths teacher.
Someone said a number divided by zero was zero and he proceeded to explain why it was not. One of the class jokers went "oh yeah, well my calculator says it's zero!". The teachers smiles and says "surely not" and approaches the joker to see what kind of shenanigan he was pulling. And sure as hell he divides five by zero and zero is the result. The teacher, not believing his own eyes, looks at the calculator, then the joker, then the calculator again. The window was open. Figure out the rest yourself.
Fly swatter that burst in to a million bits the first time I hit a fly.
The other fly swatters will know not to mess with that fly.
A can opener from a convenience store. It was barely sharp enough to puncture the metal of the can and exploded the moment I turned the crank.
Strawberrys...
On day of purchase they were fine, i put them in a fridge and next day all rotten and moldy...
Do yourself a favor and soak them in some vinegar water after you get them home. About a 1:4 mixture of white vinegar to water. The acidity will kill the mold spores that cause the berries to go bad, and it won’t be strong enough to affect the taste after you rinse them.
I usually just dump about a cup of vinegar into a mixing bowl and top it off with water when I’m getting groceries in. First thing I do is drop the berries in to soak. Then I put away all of my groceries, which gives the berries a few minutes to soak. Finally, I dump the bowl and give the berries a quick rinse with the sink sprayer.
I haven’t had strawberries go moldy since I started doing it. If I forget about them in the fridge for a week or two, they’ll simply dry out instead.
Same here, I bought Strawberries for 50% off at H-Mart, they didn't even last the night lol.
I bought mine at NETTO
Every vegie or fruit i bought there is always quickly rotten. I even saw rotten lemons and paprika in their isle
Technically, I didn't buy this, but I feel like it fits the spirit of the thread.
When I was a kid, a friend of mine gifted me an off-brand Super Nintendo controller to me for my birthday. I used it for all of about 5 minutes before it shocked the shit out of my hand and then never worked again.
Considering that a Super Nintendo will not put anything close to being able to shock you out of its ports, I think what actually happened is you shocked shit out of it and that killed it. Cus static electricity n stuff
Could be. I was sitting on the carpet. I've never seen anything like it before or since, though.
Could face been a capacitor.
Recycled plastic bin liners. They literally split at the seams as I was peeling them off the roll.
Second place goes to a pair of cheap shoes. Literally walked the soles off them in two weeks.
Third place goes to a pair of nail clippers from a consignment store. The metal bent rather than cut through my fingernails. (Maybe it would have worked better under the red sun of my home planet?)
I've had a pair of nail clippers break similarly, but the edge split instead of cutting my nail. I think glass clippers would have been better.
A pack of six light bulbs. Five of them sheared right off the metal base like wet tissue when I screwed them in, just one right after the other. Fortunately the last one worked. I was a poor college kid with no transport then, so getting that pack of bulbs for my single lamp was a lot of effort, I was disappointed.
I bought some "Amazon basics" trash bags once. Their sides were not even properly laminated together. Just pulling them off the roll made the sides split open. Never again.
Trash trash bags, hmm.
They were so shit that I couldn't even use one to throw the rest away. I had to go out and buy some real bags just to get rid of them.
Measuring cup from Walmart. Packaging said dishwasher safe. It was not.
Better Homes Food chopper that couldn't be disassembled to clean it. Potato chunks got pulled up into the housing by the blades and just rotted there with no way to access it. The exact same model is still sold in stores.
Packaging said dishwasher safe.
Maybe they meant the packaging was dishwasher safe 🤔
I've had measuring cups where all the markings come off.
I once bought cheap headphones from amazon without reading reviews. They literally fell apart in my hands as I took them out the packet.
Dr Dre Beats?
No they were really, really cheap ones.
A friend of mine made an online store and he started selling
e-wasteahem… various affordable electronics. He wanted me to test a Chinese tablet, and I said yes. This was back in the day when Android Honeycomb was a thing and iPad 2 was a reasonable option, so even the best tablets weren’t that great.I got the tablet, charged the battery, booted it up, and it was just barely ok. It worked, but it was really slow. I mean, like slower than my first Android phone. This was not even last gen hardware. It was clear that
someall corners were cut. The storage, CPU, RAM, bandwidth etc. Every component was the slowest one available.Anyway, the testing went slowly, as you would expect. It ran out of battery very quickly, because of course it did. Why put large cells or even mediocre quality cells in a cash grab like this. So, I charged it up and continued testing later until it ran out of battery again. Rinse and repeat.
After a few days of testing, It just didn’t boot up any more. Apparently some of those cheap components just couldn’t take the heat that comes with using a battery powered device. Rust in pieces! I hope this abomination gets ground to shreads and drowned in sulfuric acid.
I returned the tablet to my friend and I never heard from it again.
At this point, pretty much anything purchased on Amazon. Nowadays even stuff that looks like it's from a legit seller can end up being a knockoff from a scam seller because of their warehouse storage logistics. Or they sell a high quality item long enough to get good reviews on the listing, then switch it out with some cheap piece of shit to take in the dough until the rating is tanked, lather rinse repeat. It's just becoming more and more like Wish/Temu where the listings are straight up lies and they just rely on people not wanting to do through the trouble of a return.
This was a few years back, before I knew this was even possible, but a portable hard drive off of Amazon. Not only was it sharp on all edges, it was only programed to show the storage without actually having it. I spent an evening "moving" docs from a dying laptop, only to plug it in the next day two find a fraction of what I thought I moved over.
Also, a yoga mat that disintegrated when I went to do a plank. Just pressing my hands into it was enough for it to flake apart.
I purchased a hammer at a dollar store once, just to see how bad it was.
I found out when the head of the hammer flew off on a back-swing and put a whole in the wall. The neck of the hammer was made of flimsy, hollow tube metal and the head had only been tack-welded on in 2 places.
Hell yeah dude the manslaughter hammer
A cheap USB 32GB pendrive. It would barely reach 1MB/s transfer speeds and started corrupting files almost instantly.
I bought a size of pizza from a food truck in DC and it was so bad I threw it away. Which is saying a lot for pizza
A knockoff iPhone charger from China. I plugged it into my computer and it literally caught fire.
Good thread to promote !buyitforlife@slrpnk.net
I bought an ouya. I remember just about everything sucked. It's the thing that came into mind.
It's funny that Ouya's brand recognition is so infamous that no additional explanation is needed.
We bought a shower mat that reeked of plastic offgassing, so we left it outside to air out for a month, and it still smelled like shit, so we threw it away.
Happened to me with a laptop case. Made me nauseous and suspicious of anything made from neoprene since.
A T-shirt a friend gave me when going back from China. It had a small smell, so I put it in washing machine. It end up completely torn in several part... I didn't,t even had a chance to wear it once 🤣
Purchases from Wish. A pair of block heels where the heel length didn't match the shoe arch. Wearing them meant constantly falling backwards. It was so comically bad, the seller gave me a refund and said don't bother sending them back.
A Gorillaz t-shirt, also from Wish. The picture on the website looked ok. However, what I received was so awful I thought it was a prank. The white shirt had what I assumed was yellow rust stains. It looked like a rag kicked underneath a disgusting kitchen frier and left there for years.
Some of the seams were on the outside and some were on the inside. The print itself was heavily pixilated, as if someone took an internet forum avatar image, blew it up, and stuck it onto a shirt.
Please tell me you stopped ordering from Wish. This is literally the business model, hoping that people won't try to initiate a return.
Yes, I no longer order from Wish or Temu or any of these sketchy Chinese sites.
1985 Pontiac Sunbird and my parents had a 1986 Buick Skyhawk. Both were exactly the same car, just different front fascia. Same crappy 1.8L SOHC engine and terrible build quality.
Both cars blew head gaskets at 50,000 miles and my Sunbird blew it again at 65,000miles. Neither car were ever overheated. The A/C on both cars died at 60K. Various parts of the exterior and interior were just plain falling apart. The cars' performance was absolutely abysmal.
The cars were so bad that I haven't purchased another GM product since, nor will I ever buy another product from GM. My Dad had bought a mid-90's Oldmobile 88 and it was actually OK for the most part. It just ate alternators, until I convinced him to put an upgraded aftermarket unit on and that problem was solved. Later he bought a Chevy Traverse and that thing was an absolute piece of trash. He had to put timing chains on it at 70k and that was a $2500 bill. The power steering also went out on it multiple times. He had the steering rack and power steering pump replaced multiple times.
I traded my old Sunbird in on a 1985 Toyota Corolla GT-S and THAT was my absolute favorite car of all time. I autocrossed it for several years and it never broke. I'd love to find one to restore. I have owned multiple Toyotas in my 39 years of driving. My current car is a Camry Hybrid.
Microsoft Surface.
In no particular order:
The Alcantara keyboard cover stated delaminating and the top layer started peeling off just from the friction of resting your hands on it. Started happening within months of getting it.
Battery failed after just a few years of daily use, I'm talking completely refused to charge, you unplug the charger even after leaving it in overnight and the screen goes black instantly. And while most laptops can run just fine with a dead battery as long as you keep it plugged in at all times, not the Surface. The little magnetic connector supplies so little power that the device is forced to down clock to below 1 GHz to keep from shutting down due to undercurrent. And sometimes it shuts down anyway because fuck you.
It's also glued so tight, and the front glass is so thin, that you basically can't open it without destroying the screen in the process.
Also, the magnetic charge connector started having contact issues around the same time the battery was starting to fail, so the moment you bump it, it disconnects and causes the device to turn off. It also just refuses to connect half the time when you plug it in. Gotta jiggle it, blow into it, shake and hit it a bunch of times, and pray. I'm pretty sure it's the tablet's side that's the problem because changing chargers did nothing, and the charger that came with the problem tablet worked fine on another Surface. Gotta love when companies make the fragile part of the connector apart of the $2000 device that's sealed shut with glue and put the more robust part on the cheap and easily replaceable charger.
It's also really bad at going to sleep. Way too many times I've closed it, put it in my bag, and when I take it out it's scalding hot and the battery is nearly drained. It's your own device Microsoft, running 100% your own software. How the hell do you fuck it up?!
Worst. Tablet. EVER. And probably ruined any potential that laptop-replacement tablets once had, which is a shame because I still like the tablet form factor.
The thing that immediately comes to mind is a cheap telescoping fly swatter. . Old radio antenna style shaft / handle. The part that’s supposed to swat the flies was a massive square that was way too heavy and had so much drag that it would flop and never hit flat and was too slow because of it. Never once was able to kill a fly and after about the fifth try the handle broke in half and the top flew off launching into the great Beyond. Pretty sure it’s still lodged behind a couch somewhere.
A Logitech gaming headset, I think it was G332. My main headphones broke, and I needed some ASAP, so I went to the local store and bought them as backup ones. The black paint on the padding started peeling off almost immediately and it got everywhere, like sand.
I think all headsets fall in this category, never had one last a year without repairs. I've replaced so much of my current headphones that it doesn't even look like the same model anymore.
I did buy a number of fake flash drives, so they're definitely up there. Luckily I've always won the disputes and got my money back from every one of them.
There were also a number of headphones whose sound was so fucking bad, listening to stuff off my phone's speakers was better
A replacement PCV valve for my car.
Car was around 100,000 miles, figured it was a good time to do a big refresh & replace a bunch of stuff. Spark plugs, belts & hoses, fuel & air filters, fluids, etc etc... While I was at the parts store, guy suggested I also replace the PCV valve. But, it turned out the only one he had in stock was the store brand. $4, sure whatever. Got it home, took the factory one off the car, and sure enough it was gummed up kinda bad. But went to put the new one on, and it just about collapsed in my hands. It was so flimsy, kinda like a drinking straw. Ended up cleaning the factory one & putting it back on, threw the new one away.
Years ago I bought an angle grinder from Aldi, for about 20,-. After 30 min it started to smell and the enclosure started to melt. I brought ist back still warm and smelling burnt in order to recieve my refund. Although I knew it couldn't be of good quality I expected it to last a little bit longer. If you buy cheap you buy twice.
A wireless logitech mouse for gaming from back when wireless technology for periferals still meant a decent amount of latency. I learned quickly why latency is important when gaming. Also the precission of the mouse was terrible as it would regularly skip backwards under slightly accelerated movements. It was pretty humbling for me as a ~15 year old kid to realize I wasted around 4 weeks of newspaper work money on a mouse which I gave up on almost the same day as I bought it.
My Muller hand mixer was designed to break.
Feit light bulbs aren't worth it for any price less than free.
I'm annoyed that feit is the only brand available at home depot now. I thought big box stores and capitalism were supposed to give me a choice in what I buy. Guess not anymore eh?
There's probably worse, but off the top of my head, a Sandisk Curzer Fit USB 3.0 drive. It would overheat about 15 seconds into a file transfer and throttle to well below USB 2.0 speeds, perhaps even USB 1.1. I tried to alleviate the issue by using it through a USB 2.0 extender (thereby ruining its entire appeal to compactness), but it developed bad sectors soon enough. It was satisfying smashing it to bits with a hammer though.
Those Dollar Store umbrellas! They are so shit they will break if the slightest bit of wind hits them, or maybe the flimsy metal frame breaks from closing it.
Sure it's from the Dollar Store, but I've bought lots of things from there that have last a decent around of time.
I purchased sunglasses in the Philippines and they broke the same day. I purchased a different pair from a different stand and they broke the same day. Im convinced the defective bottom of the barrel get dumped onto the Philippines
So apparently this is 100% a thing with expensive camera lenses. Different markets will get different quality lenses despite the model being marked as the same.
It's also why I won't buy clothing from US based outlets, as the brands have been known to explicitly manufacture lower quality product to sell at outlets. That said, the only time this actually comes up for me (being an Australian), is that I won't buy big brand clothing at Costco.
Quip was pretty awful compared to Sonicare.
Yep. Absolute garbage.
Can I nominate an airline?
Edit: I misread the question. I thought it was "lowest quality product that you still use" (I was distracted)
Original comment: Harbor freight calipers. Surprisingly still accurate and undamaged through years of abuse. Kind of amazing, and shockingly useful.
I bought a harbor freight heat gun. All I'll use it for is lighting charcoal. Very uneven heat, and will melt itself if you don't turn it nozzle up when you turn it off.
Cheap mini Bluetooth keyboard. It kept disconnecting and missing keystrokes. Input latency was awful too. 2010s Bluetooth was so bad
We got gifted a plastic rack for garden utensils. My mother in law bought it for us from the local supermarket (which has various cheap crap every week). Anyway, we placed a few items in it and it broke in a day. Utterly useless.
Barely working solar charger
probably not the lowest quality, but an allarm clock from walmart that sheared/tore off the prongs from its plug leaving them in the outlet. (to have some charity I was putting significant strain on it)
Alarm clocks have been the bane of my existence. Almost every one of them is a cheap POS that barely handles you hitting the snooze button
I can barely count the number of alarm clocks that I ended up destroying by hitting the snooze button on two hands.
