Wealth Finance

Editor’s note: In this first post of a three-part series, Consumer Reports Money Adviser Associate Finance Editor and Resident Curmudgeon Anthony Giorgianni presents his examples of frustrating changes in product design. Who’s to blame for this silliness? Most likely, Giorgianni hypothesizes, it’s a young, inexperienced engineer named Blake. One of my father’s favorite sayings, which admittedly he directed at me all too often, was: “You’re improving less.” Now that he has passed on, I find myself sometimes saying the same thing. It’s usually when I see a product that purportedly has been “improved” in some way but, to my way of thinking, is a step in the wrong direction. These changes are so wrongheaded, there’s only one explanation for them. There’s a young engineer going from company to company messing things up. This person, whose name I’ll assume is Blake, has a fresh way of looking at things that seems exciting … on the drawing board. But Blake hasn’t had the life experience necessary to understand the practical implications. So we end up having to keep our old stuff – as I have with my 1992 Ford Explorer – or surrendering convenience and other benefits and settling for the stuff that has “improved less.” Here are some examples. I invite you to reply with some of your own. • Plastic car bumpers. The only one who could have come up with this idea is someone who has never owned a car.  It was bad enough that Reagan Administration eliminated the federal 5-mile-per-hour bumper requirement. Now, metal bumpers have been replaced—or covered with—plastic that chips, scratches, dents, and cracks with just a tap. It’s so irritating that people now are spending money on products like the “Bumper Buddy,” essentially a bumper for their bumpers. Not only are plastic bumpers impractical, I think they’re tacky, adding to the jelly bean look we’re seeing in cars nowadays. • Disappearance of the telephone speed dial. I recently tried to buy a new cordless phone and couldn’t find a single one that has speed dial, even though it’s one of the most convenient things they ever came up with. Just press and hold one button momentarily, and you’re done. Instead, this feature is being replaced with the electronic phone book, which requires a multistep process anytime you want to call a stored number. For Blake, who’s accustomed to using cell phones, this is just the way the world works. But why not keep speed dial for the most used numbers and a phonebook for the rest, like my old Uniden model? • Squeezable condiment bottles. Squeezable mustard and mayonnaise bottles make sense … if you don’t care about getting every last bit out of the container. This isn’t an issue for our young engineer, who has yet to learn the value of money. (Our Consumer Reports study of such packaging showed that up to 25 percent of some products gets left behind in these types of containers!) It’s such a bad idea that companies have forced Blake to redesign the bottle tops so they’re flat, allowing the products to be stored precariously upside down in the hope that gravity will supply what the absence of common sense took away. Why don’t they just admit their mistake and return to wide-mouth jars? What product “improvements” have left you wondering what happened to the good ‘ole days?—Anthony Giorgianni

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