I stopped into the grocery store tonight for a couple items and looked something I’ve never bought before: dishwasher soap. The only place I’ve ever lived that has one is my parents’ house. Anyway, they had Cascade powder in two sizes. The store is Butera, a medium chain (15 stores) around the Chicago area. Maybe OP has one nearby?
Success!
My wife stopped at a hardware store to buy some cleaning supplies. (She says the local grocery has really upped the prices on many such supplies.). Lo and behold, they had Cascade powder! Maybe it is just a “supply chain” issue w/ the grocery…
Estimate these 2 boxes should last past Easter. We’ll see if/where we can find it then!
Interesting. I recently switched to pods. I bought some during the pandemic when I wasn’t going to physical stores, and decided I found it more convenient. So I’ve stuck with them. I guess that may have been a good decision – I hate not being able to find my preferred product.
How do you know that it’s such a popular product?
If it is actually popular, it’s because it wasn’t profitable enough compared to other ones and marketing analysis showed that raising the price would lead to too low sales. This is pretty basic.
That makes sense if no one else offers a competing product, as you’d push people to buy the more expensive replacements. But, if there is competition, you’ll just lose the people who would have bought your product to a competitor. No profit is still worse than lower profits.
The fact that there are so many options for dishwasher powder (as shown in the video above) suggests to me that the product itself is indeed popular enough for the above logic to apply.
I also note another effect of offering a more expensive but inferior product. The video suggests that, due to not having a pre-rinse cycle, the pods are so bad that they have resulted in people thinking dishwashers aren’t actually very good at washing dishes. Long term, this could result in fewer people bothering with dishwashers if they think they need to wash the dishes before using the dishwasher. Hence, replacing a cheaper product that works better with a more expensive one that is worse can result in a decrease in demand for that entire class of product.
In short, I very much think this is merely a supply chain issue. Cascade is going to maintain their price discrimination.
Please don’t lecture me about manufacturing. You’re incorrect when it comes to a large corporation. For one, capacity isn’t limitless. There is only so much labor and machinery. They are better off using that for something more profitable if the demand is there for that. In addition, things like profit margin are used by analysts for stock prices. There are many other reasons why a low profit product is not something a company will bother to do.
That said, I do agree that it’s very likely to be a supply chain issue but I wasn’t responding to that.
Sure hajario, but why offer a cheaper per unit size for years in the first place? Perhaps they wanted to lure us into buying it only to raise the price by discontinuing the large size later. Seems like a losing strategy since there are now many cheaper competitors out there that are almost as good.
It could also be a supply chain issue since we leave in a remote-ish part of the country… but they seem to have plenty of the smaller more expensive per unit bags available for purchase and I’m pretty sure these are made in the US.
There used to be about 5 “flavors” of cascade dishwashing powder. Is it possible that they are still selling powder, but as pods take more of the market, they have cut back to one or two “flavors” of powder?
Based on what is shown on their website, they’re down to one “flavor” now.
I have no idea about the specifics of Cascade. I was speaking about manufacturing generally. Even without the supply chain issues plaguing us now, modern manufacturing is almost unbelievably complicated. It could be all kinds of non-intuitive things and weird secondary effects but mostly it’s about the most efficient use of limited resources.
Here’s an anecdote. I have been in situations where we had money losing products. It literally lost us like a hundred dollars to ship one. Why? In one case, a very important client needed us to make a legacy product at a small number per quarter. We had a room full of hard to maintain equipment that had to be kept running to make the damn things. We got so much other business from them that it was worth it for the client relations.
In another case, their volume was very high and they guaranteed a certain volume. The economy of scale for using that equipment made the price per part very cheap so we made huge profits on all of the other clients that used the same equipment which more than made up for it.
I’m sure you have all been on tenterhooks awaiting an update. You’ll be glad to know that this morning our local supermarket was fully stocked w/ Cascade! I consider it an x-mas miracle!
Made for easy, 1-stop x-mas shopping for all!
Meanwhile, I checked my Target again yesterday and nothing… not even a space on the shelf for it. They did have their own generic in a yellow box, though.
I got a box I’ll sell you cheap - $20! 
Well… I suspect it may have been an import market thing, because as far as I know it’s never been out of production in Plymouth, UK, and never made in the US.
Beyond that, Plymouth gin isn’t a “stingingly dry” gin in the first place; it’s a less juniper-heavy, more botanical gin that’s less dry than a dry, juniper-heavy London Dry like Boodles. Nothing wrong with either, but the author’s got his gin confused if he’s implying that Plymouth was “stingingly dry” or that Boodles is somehow a close substitute.
Thanks for the tip! Would you describe Boodles as “stingingly dry,” or agree that it might be described in such terms? Asking for a fiend
It’s pretty dry- it’s a very classic London dry gin- heavy on the juniper, not sweet in the least bit, etc… If you like Tanqueray or Beefeater, Boodles is right there in the same style. Probably the only unusual thing about it is that citrus isn’t listed among the botanicals used in its production, unlike most other London dry gins.
“Stingingly dry”? I suppose as much as anything out there.
“Especially so if used as a disinfectant”
Glad to hear it, since I hate pods. For reasons that may or may not be valid, I still prefer the “Finish” brand, and last I checked Finish powder still available at the few places that regularly stock it, but I’d be fine with switching to Cascade powder if need be. But pods seem to be dominating the market for some strange reason.
They are convenient. Instead of pulling the box out from under the sink, then pouring too much (oops) into the little compartment, and then putting the box away under the sink, i just reach under the sink and grab a pod.
I’m still using liquid laundry detergent, though.
I’ve used pods for years. They are more convenient. What’s wrong with pods?