My daughter had to buy bridesmaid-type dress to wear as part of a “Royal Court” for our local Portugeuse Festa parade. Afterwards, I was going to have it cleaned and then donate it to Goodwill or somewhere.
The tags specifically say that the dress cannot be cleaned, except for spot cleaning with a damp cloth. No handwashing, no dry cleaning.
My wife bought a “Torso Tiger” after seeing a TV commercial for it, in which it appeared to be a fairly well-constructed piece of equipment for working your abs. In actual fact, it was a complete piece of shit consisting of about two dollars’ worth of very lightweight plastic and two rubber hoses that a) offered almost nothing in the way of resistance and b) snapped after a couple of uses. Even if it had been made of stronger stuff, the exercise concept itself was faulty, essentially putting undue stress on the wrists, knees, and back for minimal impact on the abs. It offered no advantage over doing sit-ups or crunches for free. If you see one at a yard sale for five cents, save your money.
This was a cheapie but I bought a six dollar rollable membrane keyboard online.
I never got even one minute of use as it was broken from day one with some buttons not responding. Within hours of trying to see if it was a driver problem which it wasn’t at least half the keys were defective or misfiring.
Total piece of trash that didn’t even function out opf the box.
Handheld Shower from Home Depot–their house brand.
Bad angle, no water pressure, next to useless.
It was $20+tx, I returned it and ordered a Speakman online.
I bought some of that roll out flower bed stuff. It did work but still was unsatisfied.
I bought an electronic device that was supposed to repel spiders via an ultrasonic noise, similar to this but a different brand.
I returned it when a spider built a web on it.
To be fair, I never really thought it would work. It was an act of desperation in a situation where my hands were otherwise tied.
I’m tempted to nominate this GE Cordless phone. Bought in 2009. The extra Handset in the guest bedroom has started mysteriously locking up if it’s not used for a few months. Requires a battery pull and insertion to fix. The display in the living room handset has lost so many pixels it’s almost unreadable.
Products these days are such utter crap. A phone should last 20 years.
An optics cleaner which smeared glue over the eyepieces of my best binoculars.
Let me guess, an HP? I could have written this one about a year ago. I think there was a curse on everything I bought last August. Seriously.
And it keeps on giving. About every three days a pop-up comes up announcing that “there are updates!” Will they make it work? They haven’t so far.
A microfiber Venetian blind duster similar to this one. Most blinds have so many strings going every which way that you can only sweep a few inches at a time before you hit more strings. Not only did I have this problem, but all the thing did was push the dust along the blinds instead of picking it up.
Still using it, I see? 
This made me gasp. Were you able to fix them?
This is as good a place as any to tell this story from Saturday.
I’ve had a good five years of hard financial life. We’re now starting to be able to do things like normal people again, and after driving scary, shitty cars for all of this time, my husband (he’s so fucking cool!) surprised me with a new Jeep. Not totally new, just new to me, but it is BEAUTIFUL and I fell in love with it immediately. Well, we had to go down to the dealership to get his car and get some breakfast. I let him keep driving since he won’t get much face time with it. After breakfast, I hopped in for the 5 or 6 mile drive home, totally stoked, and three minutes later, just after getting on the freeway, THE ENGINE BLEW UP.
Didn’t have it three whole hours.
Turned out awesome, though. Dealership is going out of their way to be cool. Gave me a loaner Jeep to have while they figure things out. Got the call today, and yeah, I blew it up, but they’re going to give me a brand new engine on their dime. So an 06 with 75k miles on it, and they’re going to fix it right up. I am a lucky girl, and if the way they’re handling this continues in this astonishingly bitchin’ fashion, I will climb to the nearest easily accessible high point and shout their praises.
I did time in the car business some years ago, and while this may be part of how well I’m being treated, I really expected this to go completely fubar.
Gah.
There’s a few dollar store items that are alright.
There’s a few more that I’ll never, ever buy again such as shampoo, bathroom squeegees, and, especially, paper napkins. The napkins were the worst, shredding with minimal pressure and god forbid you get them moist or you’re cleaning napkin pulp all over the place.
HP scanner. Damn thing never started properly or woke properly or talked to my PC correctly. To get any use out of it I would have reinstall (or download and reinstall) the drivers. Every. Single. Time.
I don’t know when HP started sucking so badly. I have an old B&W laser printer (HP4L) in the shed which would still be running today if I could be bothered getting a cable adapter and finding a toner cartridge for it.
Well that blows!
(sorry, I couldn’t resist)
I did that too! Not only were they threadbare, they were virtually water-proof. You had to use them to PUSH the water off you!
I’ll have to google it, but I do recall that japanese shampoo is quite different from shampoos elsewhere. The PH balance of japanese hair is just SO different that it really is a totally different animal from what westerners use. I know people have mentioned needing to import or bring their own brand of shampoo when visiting or working in Japan. This doesn’t mean it WASN’T shitty shampoo that you got, but it might just be ‘shampoo not made for you’.
As a previous HP printer tech support slave, this will be my guess as well. 
Yep!