It’s the other way around. The challenge (and the resulting poisonings, hospitalizations) caused the sales to spike. The increased sales didn’t cause kids to start eating them. Having said that, take a look at the data, there has absolutely been an uptick in the number of kids getting sick from eating them. According to poison control, the number of calls the received for teens intentionally “exposing” themselves to the pods was 39 in 2016, 53 in 2017 and 39 in the first two weeks of this year.
Think about that, they went from once a week to twice per day. That’s huge. If I were to extrapolate, I’d expect over 700 by the end of the year (and by your third trimester you can expect to have hundreds of babies inside of you).
100 is probably high for actually swallowing them (regarding the teens and the challenge). I’m guessing it’s not that high for just popping them in their mouth and spitting it out before it opens or very soon after. I figured I’d go somewhere in the middle.
I use the Kirkland flavored ones. It’s more convenient then measuring out an amount. The cost difference for me, the only one in the household, is so minimal it’s not worth considering. I also have a jug of regular laundry soap if i wanted to do something different, more or less soap.
That’s what I thought. To the extent that I’ve seen any of these videos (and really, that’s just been in news reports about the phenomenon), what I’ve seen are kids putting them in their mouth, biting down, gagging a bit, and spitting them out.
Still a stupid thing to do, but I don’t think most people are actually gobbling them down like candy.
Why would they ban sales? It’s not like Tide (and other brands) Pods are even the most poisonous thing in most peoples cleaning cabinets. Do we ban bleach, antifreeze, ammonia, etc.? Hell, bleach and ammonia are a few feet away from each other in the cleaning aisle. When some idiot starts a chloramine vapor sniffing challenge and even bigger idiots play along, do we ban them too?
The thing is, even though it’s clearly a hoax, there’s really no end to dumb shit teenagers will try. If even a few of them don’t think it’s a hoax, their general sense of self-preservation probably isn’t strong enough to not eat soap.
I remember as a young 20-something, talking to a teenage cousin of mine, who was detailing some absurdly stupid and dangerous thing that he and his buddies were attempting and they were going to send it in to Jackass. I asked him if he had ever read the disclaimer that ran before every single episode of Jackass that said that you should never try this kind of crap and they would never accept any submissions of stunts from anyone?
The generic pods always have a have that weird chemical aftertaste.
But for real, I just have a shelf over my washer and use the big liquid ones with a spigot. I don’t even bother measuring the detergent. I just fill up the washer, click the button on the spigot for a second and call it good. It’s nowhere near a full, or even a half of one of those cups. It’s probably a could of ‘heaping’ tablespoons. So, what’s that, a bit more than a quarter cup? Seems to work find.
And I started using waaay less years ago based on reading something (probably here) that someone mentioned up thread, that there’s probably enough detergent left in your clothes from last time to really only need to use it every other time. I figured if that’s even kinda true, how about I just use a fraction of what I normally use. So far it works.
And, for me, that works too. Plenty of times, I’ve done the math on something and thought 'well, this one is 12¢ per unit, but the one I’d rather get is 20¢ per unit. I know I should get the cheaper one and they’re basically the same (lets call it detergent vs pods), but when you’re buying enough to last a year, well, I can manage to spread the extra 10 bucks out over the course of a year to get the one I prefer.
My kids were talking about Tide Pod Challenge YouTube videos recently. They both thought the whole thing was “stupid” because all the kids did in the videos was “put the pods in their mouth and then spit them out”.
Of course, there are some real-life outliers who cannot help but push the envelope. But those outliers don’t appear to be the mainstream of the Tide Pod Challenge thing.
In an article I read that included an interview with a doctor, advocating NOT eating the damn things, the doctor pointed out that a lot of the trouble they could be seeing from this “fad” is when the kid bites the pod and the detergent squirts out into their mouth, it burns (and tastes bad), they are surprised, they aspirate the stuff, and lungs get burnt.
I think there are many more reasons for the radio station to be lying than P&G. I suspect the “facts”, interesting or otherwise, are made-up. P&G sells to distributors, not consumers. Any increase in their sales would have to last more than a week and would take months for them to notice a significant increase.
No wonder “Fake News” is such a thing. People have lost the ability to tell the difference.
I’m not saying we should ban them by any means, but this is precisely how bad laws get passed: Everyone is talking about it (for the moment at least) so this is the perfect time for a politician to stand next to a big poster of a pretty blond girl and say “How many more children must die senseless deaths? Today, I am submitting a bill before the legislature called Tiffany’s Law. If even one more innocent child dies a senseless death, it will be one too many…” If the politician waits too long, nobody will care about Tide Pods any more and he won’t get his time on TV.
But, having said that, I don’t think it would be unreasonable to have the pods be puke-colored instead of candy-colored.
To a certain extent, Tim R. Mortiss is correct that from a profitability standpoint, it doesn’t matter.
Secondly, what makes you think a significant number of people are actually eating these things? From a quote I found:
“The Washington Post reported that the American Association of Poison Control Centers (AAPCC) reported 37 cases of pod ingestion among teenagers in 2018, with half of them being intentional”
P&G sells something like $1 billion in Tide PODS every year.
I work in a high school. With other eating “challenges”, I’d hear a lot of the students talking about making their own ghost pepper, bitter stuff, etc videos. But with this? It’s all “Who would be stupid enough to eat detergent?” My daughter, who attends a different high school tells me it’s the same at her school. I think it’s mostly a lot of “Look how stupid ‘other’ people can be” talk.
I’m sure that’s exactly what it is. But there’s plenty of kids that will do stupid stuff. Not because they don’t know it’s stupid, but for their own reasons. Whether it’s for an audience or it’s because they’re not very popular and they know this will have people talking about them, or they are popular…for doing this kind of stuff and they have a reputation to keep up. Granted, this is probably more dangerous than pulling the fire alarm or swapping out the tape the teacher is going to play with a porn, but it still gets people watching them. And like most other things done in high school, even if they know it’s dangerous, they’re still not thinking more than 10 minutes into the future.
