Hand Soap

I like to go to places like Marshall’s and Home Goods and look at all the fancy hand soaps they sell.  Operative word being “look”.  I do not “buy” because it seems like a lot of money to spend on some hand soap.  Yes, the container and the packaging are pretty.  Yes, it smells nice.  But do I need to spend $5 to $8 for that?  Soap is soap after all.  The brand I buy at Giant for a dollar gets the job done just fine.

After being married to Ernie for 39 years and 3 months (but who’s counting?), I guess some of his thriftiness has rubbed off on me.  Because if I followed suit in the manner of my mom, for example, she wouldn’t bat an eye at buying the pretty, more expensive soap.

But, while I am willing to live large on some things with my disposable income, as I covered in last week’s blog (expensive pepperoni pizza at Maple Glen, super soft Charmin toilet paper, and Puffs Plus tissues in the square, not rectangular, box), I am not so inclined to pay extra on hand soap just for pretty packaging.

That is, until now, where I have reached my limit of patience with the dang dollar brand at Giant.

Used to be that maybe one out of five that I would buy at a time would have issues with opening the pump dispenser.

You turn the pump dispenser nozzle to the left, as it states to do, to open it, but nothing happens.  You spin, you spin, you spin.  And it doesn’t pop up. Some choice expletives have been known to slip from my lips at that point.

Since you have experienced this before you have developed a couple of work arounds.  You learn that maybe if you unscrew the whole dispenser from the bottle, lift it up a bit, spin the dispenser some more and in both directions, then screw it back in and then spin it to the left again, voilá! It magically pops up!  You feel a bit like a magician albeit one that has no clue what they just did and how they made it work.  You only know that it worked.

Problem is, that work around doesn’t always work.  And when you have tried that and failed, more, even choicer expletives let loose from the lips and you move on to the, Why Reinvent The Wheel Solution. Which is to simply take the pump from the empty bottle you are replacing and put it on the new bottle of soap.

Problem is, if you aren’t recalling all this agita about opening up a new container of hand soap and have already thrown out the empty container of hand soap you need to replace, and you have OCD around germs, you aren’t going to fish that empty container of soap out of the trash and so you are back to square one.

The third work around is to rule out user error.  You ask your husband or any other able bodied human being living with you to try and open it.  If they can’t do it either, then you know it’s not just you, and the situation really is hopeless.

Right now I have 5 bottles of the Care One Giant brand hand soap that I bought for a dollar each, sitting in my linen closet waiting to be used.  The hand soap in my kitchen needed replacing today.  I had already thrown out the empty one.  I went to my closet and pulled out a new soap. 

Well, you can guess what happened next. 

Ok, I thought.  That one didn’t work.  But I have 4 other ones! Surely one of them will work! Usually, the odds are 1 out of 5 won’t work.

The odds were not ever in my favor, not even temporarily in my favor.

5 out of 5 pumps failed to pop open.  That’s an abysmal operational failure rate.  And, dare I say? Unacceptable.

Now I have been pushed to a decision point in the decision point tree.

Does your hand soap open properly and with ease?  If yes, keep buying it. 

If no, does your hand soap open properly and with ease 4 times out of 5? If yes, keep buying it.

Does your hand soap NOT open properly and with ease 5 times out of 5? If yes, consider the following options:

Option A: Just chalk it up to a little bad luck because most times it works 4 out of 5 times, so keep buying it.

Option B:  Evaluate your risk/reward and balance that against your patience levels, and cross-reference that against your time and effort co-efficients and if that equation results in a “These cheap f*&^ckng hand soap dispensers are so not worth it”, then time to buy a new soap brand.

Looks like it’s going to be Option B.  I have a little time though.  I went into the 2nd bathroom upstairs that no one uses except for when we have people staying over and grabbed that soap and put it in the kitchen.

I just need to remember that when that soap runs out, to not throw it away and use that pump for the remaining 5 soaps in my linen closet. Can’t let that soap go to waste!

Meanwhile, I’ll start re-evaluating my hand soap options.  I’ll be looking for the holy grail.  Nice soap in some pretty packaging that I can buy for under $5, whose pumps open the way they are supposed to.