What things are good, but not what they are advertised as?
I have an example: Rao’s Homemade Vodka Sauce is a good marinara. It is not a vodka sauce. It contains vodka and cheese, but no cream, and I have absolutely no idea what they were thinking when they called it a vodka sauce. For reference, here’s what a vodka sauce is. There’s lots of variations on the theme, but everyone seems to agree it contains cream. Except Rao’s, for some unknown reason.
I remember my university bookstore had to restrict the sale of surgical probes meant for use in biology labs because they made excellent lock picks. More than once, I was able to help a dorm mate who locked himself out of his room with my set.
Hi, I’m the Lock Picking Lawyer. Today I’ll be using some tools that Bosnian Bill and I didn’t have to make.
And I remember when McDonald’s had to discontinue the little mini-spoons they had as coffee stirrers because apparently they were ideal for whatever cocaine users used them for.
That’s a good example.
Cheap consumer electronics such as knockoffs of FitBit - they are often advertised as looking nicer than they actually are (bigger, more colourful screens with less bezel, for example). Typically, they are still pretty good value when the price and actual features are considered alone, but they are not as advertised.
In & Out Burger
Definitely not worth the hours long wait that comes about whenever they open a store in a new market.
Basic mediocre burger, fries and shake.
(Hate to admit I own a few since I despise the owner of the company) but while the claims MyPillow makes about all the ailments it can cure (insomnia, snoring, migraines, neck pain, back pain, etc.) are a bunch of snake oil as far as I’m concerned, they do make a really nice pillow that keeps it’s shape, can be washed, and returned to it’s original volume and shape just by fluffing them.
See also: Five Guys
IMO, these places were/are hot because they hit the scene offering basic “normal” but fresh burgers and normal homemade-type (but just-made) fries. Both of these have, so far as I can tell, good, fresh, quality ingredients (for real).* Burger fast food like this wasn’t available at a chain at that time.
So these places got great word-of-mouth promotion from the start. There wasn’t much special about their food other than it was truly fresh and high-quality, and that was plenty.
But people go a little too crazy over some of it. I’ve never liked the fries at In-N-Out that people rave about. BUT I do not deny that they’re made from good fresh potatoes cut and fried when you order them. They just bore me and taste vaguely cardboardy.
The burgers I like for their fresh simplicity but they’re only special because the fast food behemoths sell crap by comparison.
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*Every fast-food restaurant says they have “quality fresh ingredients!” but it’s just corporate marketing bullshit. I mean, it’s true as far as it goes, McD’s and BK aren’t going to try to sell month-old onions or buns, but they freeze anything they can and use ingredients of the absolute lowest quality they can according to how their consumer focus groups respond to taste tests.
I just put some grout freshener on the bathroom walls, to cover the yellow dinginess of what was between the tiles. It looks nice and white, but I’m not trying to delude myself it will be “White Forever” like the name of the product. If the whiteness lasts a year, i will be pleasantly surprised.
The one that bugs me lately is the ad for the blood sugar meter that is worn on the body, replacing finger stick tests. It shows a diabetic guy at a restaurant watching sadly as all the food disappears in front of him. But he uses his meter, and all of a sudden he can order whatever he wants.
That not how the meter works. It just shows you what your blood sugar level is, just like finger stick tests. If he couldn’t eat the fatty sugary stuff before, he still can’t. But the ad hints that using the meter will let you eat more of your favorite unhealthy foods. The ad doesn’t say that directly, but the suggestion is there.
There is some leeway. When her blood sugar is high, my mother has to count every carb. When it is low, she occasionally needs to eat something with sugar in it. A meter that shows her level right now would give her some flexibility in ordering a meal.
Sleep Number bed. At a hotel I stayed at once.
Fiddle-farting around with that damned controller produced all manner of various settings changes in so many areas that they seem to either counteract each other or makes previous setting worse and was fucking impossible to undo without starting all over again. 20 minutes of messing with it produced nothing better than I would have with my “dumb” mattress in my own bed. Overrated gimmick.
Nitrile gloves. I used to wear them all the time as an EMT, so much so that I would stuff a bunch in my pants pocket and sometimes come home with some spare unused ones. When I figured out how many other uses there were for them besides creating a barrier between you and the patient, I bought an entire box to keep at home. A few of the good, but not as advertised uses for them:
When I rip the skin open on my hand (which I do fairly often, because of the sport I do), I wear a glove on the injured hand in the shower so that shampoo and soap don’t sting the wound.
Once a week, I will don a glove, grab a small plastic bag, and pick up all the dog poop my dog left in the yard with my gloved hand.
My boyfriend was making hot sauce last week, and he wore nitrile gloves any time he had to handle hot peppers so that the oils wouldn’t come off on his hands.
ETA: Actually, nitrile gloves work well as advertised, too. So maybe this doesn’t quite fit the spirit of the thread.
If you have a latex allergy, and still want to avoid adding your fingerprints to hand-shaped polymer clay, they work for that too.
Five Guys recently opened a location in my city. I went there a couple times, and it was OK, but I joked that it was called that because it would take five guys to eat all those fries.
People I know who have patronized the local one said it was incredibly overpriced - almost $20 for a burger, fries, and beverage!
When Popeye’s opened here, they had to have police officers directing traffic, in part because cars were blocking the parking lot of the post office up the road! C’mon folks, it was still going to be there next week! (In the meantime, that location has been shut down a couple times for health code violations; I’ve been there a couple times, and the biscuits are great but the rest was meh, to me anyway.)
Five guys is the only chain I’m aware of that has chopped bell peppers as an option to put on your burger. Which I love! So that one thing puts them above other chains.
One thing very good about sleep number is you can set different firmnesses for you and your partner. That’s been real helpful in my marriage.
