Roedy Green’s Product Pans

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Introduction	Electric Kettles
Flexon Eyeglass Frames	Campbell’s Soup
Colgate Toothpaste.	Links

Introduction

These are the products I personally pan. They don’t live up to their advertising hype.

Flexon Eyeglass Frames

I wish to warn you about Marchon’s Flexon Eyeglass Frames. When you first buy them you will love them. They are so comfortable, with your eyes closed, you would have trouble telling if you were wearing them. Going back to conventional frames is like donning medieval torture devices. The temples and bridge are made of titanium memory alloy that remembers its shape when bent. The frames and hinges are ordinary metal.

Unfortunately, the hinges are even more delicate than ordinary frames so you cannot treat them as roughly as the commercials suggest. I had to take mine in every month to be repaired. After nine months the grey coating on the temples was completely worn off. The glasses kept slipping off. Eventually, after about a year, the hinges broke completely and Flexon replaced them under the two year warranty. They too soon fell apart and I abandoned them for some sturdy conventional frames.

Colgate Toothpaste.

My complaint is not with the Colgate toothpaste per se, (though I find the taste somewhat unpleasant) but with the infernal flip top cap. It simply won’t stay closed. One time it burst open during a plane flight and sprayed the bleaching toothpaste all over everything. Further, the cap is hard to keep clean. The toothpaste has plasticisers in it that make it turn to chewing gum when it dries, which makes it even harder to keep the cap clean.

I wrote a letter to Colgate complaining. They explained I could unscrew the cap if I preferred the old fashioned method. That was not my complaint. My complaint is the flip top cap won’t stay closed, whether you use it or not. To add insult to injury, they sent me three coupons good for three more giant-sized tubes of the product!

I suppose I could continue to use their toothpaste, using a cap borrowed from a competitor’s product, but by then I was too ticked with them to bother. Competitor Aquafresh comes with an oversized twist lid that does not pop open.

Electric Kettles

My complaint is with every electric kettle I have ever owned. I get the impression their designers never actually tried using them to boil water. Here are some of the typical design flaws:

There is no whistle to let you know when the water is ready.
It is difficult to close the lid or to tell when it is properly closed. Water sprays out if the lid is not properly closed.
The design is wide and squat so you have to heat a liter of water just to make enough for a cup of coffee.
The design scalds your hand with hot steam when you pour.
The detachable cord keeps detaching by itself.
The kettle has a switch you must remember to flip, rather than just plugging it in.
There are obstructions in the spout so you must fill it slowly and carefully.
There is no way to open up the kettle to clean it out or inspect it.
The design causes burping explosions of hot water if you don’t let it cool a little before you pour.
Plastic ones smell of plastic when they are new, and presumably contaminate the water with plastic.

The advantages of electric kettles over stove top versions are:

They turn themselves off.
All the power goes to heating the water, so they are quick.

Kettles are an interesting failure of capitalism. There is plenty of competition, but the manufacturers complete only on stylishness and cheapness. The kettles look great, and the prices are reasonable. The problem is with safety and durability, attributes that are not obvious from a cursory look at the kettle before you buy. Well known name brands like Black & Decker and Sunbeam are no protection from design incompetence/malice. The worst was a the Rival that could not even handle boiling dry. My $50.00 CAD My Toastess TJK-55 packed it in after a few months. The $90.00 CAD Cuisinart CJK-17 packed it in after under a year. I bought it primarily because of its 3-year warranty. The dead kettle has been in the ABC Appliances shop since 2008-06 awaiting a replacement. The retailer warned me even it too was a disposable, and should not be expected to last past the warranty. It does not whistle and the tiny on-light is placed on the kettle so that it is hard to see. The on off switch is almost invisible. The lid pops open unexpectedly exposing your hand to blast of steam. When the kettle is full, you pretty well have to hold the kettle high up on the handle, to heft the weight, exposing yourself to potential scalding.

If you read online reviews of cordless kettles, you will discover, no matter how much you are willing to pay, you can’t get a durable design. The base is the Achilles heel of all the high end kettles, a piece of deliberate planned obsolescence.

I tried a corded Proctor Silex K2070. It is a cheap 1000 watt kettle without whistle or concealed element. I burned myself the third time I used it by bracing my grip by putting my thumb just above the handle. Steam also comes out all around the on off switch and. It is hard to hold when full just by the handle. You need to put your thumb on the top to brace and get leverage. I burned myself time and time again because that is the natural way to hold the kettle. The light is placed so it is visible only if you turn out the room lights or look at the kettle from the rear. The feet fell off on the first day. I reattached them with silicone glue. When you pour the water, it comes out the sides as well as the top because the lid does not seal properly. Does anyone actually try these kettles out before putting them into production?

My sister bought a Braun Wk200 kettle. You have hold the on switch down for 10 seconds or so before it will start to boil. Then she bought an Oster Stainless Steel 360° kettle that remarkably does not scald you, and has not yet died. However, it does not whistle, and it has a plate mechanism similar to others that are not durable.

Oster 5966-33 kettle

I bought an Oster 5966-33 on 2012-01-13 for $50.00 CAD .

The handle is designed so that if you hold it naturally you won’t get scalded.
When it is on, it emits a pleasing blue light from the indicator making unusually easy to tell how full it is. The flickering patterns of blue light emitting from the top let you know how close it is to boiling. The display is remarkably intriguing given that it is just a blue light under shimmering water.
It holds 1.70 litres (1.80 US quarts), somewhat bigger than I need. It is solidly built of stainless steel, hence somewhat heavy.
The innards are smooth and easy to access and clean.

To open the lid, you tap on the cover and it is supposed to pop open. Sometimes it takes several taps. That sort of unpredictable behaviour drives me nuts. I would have preferred a lid you pull open directly. The trick is to tap it lightly, but not too lightly, with a slight twist.

This is looking promising as the best kettle since the indestructible GE kettle my mother used for forty years till her death.

Campbell’s Soup

We bought some Campbell’s Chunky Chicken à la King Soup ready to eat. It consisted of a mixture of flour and water with count ’em, one chunk of chicken in the whole can. Campbell’s has only one more step to go in cheating the customer, and I don’t intend ever to taste it.

Design A Kettle Project
products I endorse

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