Persistence of Poor Designs

Humor Personal

I marvel at how some remarkably bad designs persist. Do these people test their stuff in something resembling a real world? Do they use normal humans with normal fingers? How about the restaurant owners: do they expect people to tease out the finer details of operation while a line forms behind them, and their food cools?

This lid dispenser, I swear, was designed by makers of lids to increase lid sales after customers mangle the lids during extraction. I remember seeing these things at Culvers in probably 2010 and brushing them off as a quickly passing fad. It fade once the restaurateur discovered they suck. Because they clearly didn’t work.

I watched others struggle with them–it wasn’t just me.

I observed numerous destroyed lids nearby.

I always tried giving it a fair chance–walking up, pulling the opener with normal speed, and observing the result: usually a lost lid that had to get tossed. What a waste.

Then the darndest thing happened: these crazy-horrible dispensers started showing up in McDonalds. Really? And they had the same result. I tried; I really tried, pulling them at various speeds, pushing them in before pulling, whispering sweat nothings, etc. But the success ratio has never exceeded 50%. I’d have to reach in and pull the lid off manually with more difficulty than if they were just in a stack. Try it yourself. Go into a Culvers or McDonald’s, or wherever these dispensers have proliferated to, and and try it out.

Maybe it’s me, but it seems like some lid dispenser salesman should get a ginormous raise.

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