Home Products that Used to Work: From Great to Below Average

While shopping you are apt to notice many new products. Companies are always bringing out new and improved products. New fragrances, new scrubbing power, new soft on hands hard on dirt, new gentler formula, easier on clothes, etc. I could list hundreds of new products but why bother. The original products work great. Or they use to.

That is the problem. I have noticed that whenever a certain company brings out a new product their old product loses some of its strength. For example, I have used dual scented Febreze Noticeables ever since they came out on the market. Remember when they came out they only offered two fragrances. I used one per large room in my house. They made the whole house smell wonderful. My friends even noticed and started buying Febreze Noticeables for their homes. Then, while shopping one day, I noticed new fragrances. I figured that would be a nice change. Now my living room could smell like roses while my bedroom could smell like jasmine. I could have a wide variety of fragrances in my home. So I bought a few different fragrances, went home with them and replaced all the old Noticeables with new scents. They worked really well for the first week. Then nothing. They still had oil in them but they weren't as strong smelling as they should have been. I left them alone thinking maybe it was me, maybe I had gotten use to the smell. Then my best friend wanted to know why I quit using the Noticeables. I told him I hadn't. The new ones I bought just weren't as good as the old ones. At that point I decided to go back to using the original fragrances. I replaced all the new fragrances with the original fragrances. This didn't fix the problem either. Febreze Noticeables just did not work like they use to. When they first came out on the market the product was great. One Febreze was good for a large room. Now I have to use two sometimes three for my larger rooms.

I have found out that it is not only Febreze. Many new products just don't work as well as the originals did. Clorox Bleach is another one. The old foul-smelling Clorox Bleach works ten times better than the new, improved scented Clorox. Fructis Hair Conditioner use to untangle my hair and now I have to fight with the tangles even after using the conditioner twice. A Bic lighters use to last at least a month. Good luck getting one to last past two weeks now. Simple Green use to be the best cleaner on the market. Now if you use it you had better plan on adding a lot of your own scrubbing power. Dawn with Bleach use to be so good at cleaning your dishes it actually came with a warning label telling the consumer to not add bleach. It is better now to just buy regular detergent and add your own bleach. Your dishes will come out cleaner and you will have to scrub a lot less. Air conditioners, are another product, that does not work as well as the originals use to. I am not talking about any particular brand of air conditioner, just air conditioners in general. We would have to buy a new air conditioner maybe once every 5 or 8 years. The last air conditioner we bought lasted us 2 years.

I could fill up an entire book on products that use to be great and now are just so-so. Companies are out to make money. That is why the new on the market products work really well. They haven't been mass produced. Once the company gets the consumer hooked on their product they can start watering down the formula to make it more cost efficient for the company to produce. But what are we the consumers suppose to do? The companies make it to where we have to buy new products to get old results.