1985 Pontiac Sunbird and my parents had a 1986 Buick Skyhawk. Both were exactly the same car, just different front fascia. Same crappy 1.8L SOHC engine and terrible build quality.
Both cars blew head gaskets at 50,000 miles and my Sunbird blew it again at 65,000miles. Neither car were ever overheated. The A/C on both cars died at 60K. Various parts of the exterior and interior were just plain falling apart. The cars’ performance was absolutely abysmal.
The cars were so bad that I haven’t purchased another GM product since, nor will I ever buy another product from GM. My Dad had bought a mid-90’s Oldmobile 88 and it was actually OK for the most part. It just ate alternators, until I convinced him to put an upgraded aftermarket unit on and that problem was solved. Later he bought a Chevy Traverse and that thing was an absolute piece of trash. He had to put timing chains on it at 70k and that was a $2500 bill. The power steering also went out on it multiple times. He had the steering rack and power steering pump replaced multiple times.
I traded my old Sunbird in on a 1985 Toyota Corolla GT-S and THAT was my absolute favorite car of all time. I autocrossed it for several years and it never broke. I’d love to find one to restore. I have owned multiple Toyotas in my 39 years of driving. My current car is a Camry Hybrid.
Quip was pretty awful compared to Sonicare.
Yep. Absolute garbage.
Edit: I misread the question. I thought it was “lowest quality product that you still use” (I was distracted)
Original comment: Harbor freight calipers. Surprisingly still accurate and undamaged through years of abuse. Kind of amazing, and shockingly useful.
I bought a harbor freight heat gun. All I’ll use it for is lighting charcoal. Very uneven heat, and will melt itself if you don’t turn it nozzle up when you turn it off.
Just about anything by Betterware. The one that sticks in my mind was the non-stick stick-on hook that lasted for all of a minute before falling off under its own weight. I ended up second guessing how the thing they were selling could possibly go wrong, and if I could think of something then I wouldn’t get it.
There is one Betterware item that’s lasted the years though. A hair trap for the sink. It’s a metal disk with holes punched in it. Hard for that not to work, really.
Also, increasingly, tat off Scamazon.
Cheap mini Bluetooth keyboard. It kept disconnecting and missing keystrokes. Input latency was awful too. 2010s Bluetooth was so bad
A bit off topic; a friend of mine purchased a play mat for his kid, one of those you put on the floor with a birdseye view of roads, buildings etc., from wish (yeah, expectations weren’t high to begin with). When it arrived he realized it was roughly 30 by 30 centimeters.
We went back and looked at the listing on wish, and while no dimensions were listed, the one image it had was of a kid sitting on the mat playing. That kid must’ve been less than 5 centimeters tall.
Wouldn’t be surprised if the kid playing on the mat would be part of the print as well.
You know those apple slicer things that look like a wagon wheel pattern blade with a circle in the middle so you can core it and slice it in one swoop? We found one for watermelons. No shit. In hindsight, I’m guessing it was supposed to be more of a funny novelty than something actually used, but… we used it…
It made it about half an inch into the melon, then shattered like it was some kind of ACME explosion. Bits of plastic went EVERYWHERE, my melon was now wearing a crown of blades, and I was just standing there with a handle still in each hand trying to process wtf just happened, like Wile-E-Coyote still holding the steering wheel of the car that just blew up around him looking straight at the camera like “well that just fucking happened…”
0/10
haha love this, i had something similar but lesd explosive with a metal temu garlic press… it completely bent out of shape on the first garlic cloves i used it on hahaha
Bargain store potato knives with plastic hilts have only 2cm of blade inside.
“full tang” is the wording to look for on knives. I have gotten cheap ones before that had a little foil strip on the plastic handle to make it look like it was all metal.
Plastic clothes pins that degraded in the sunlight, turned into plastic powder.
My mom always bought those, granted they last close to a year but damn the cheap bamboo ones cost practically the same and last forever
I bought a cheap scientific calculator for math class. When I tried to multiply .5 by .5 it gave a long irrational number instead of .25. then I had to try to explain to the store clerk why that was wrong before they would accept the return
This reminds me of a story with an old high school maths teacher.
Someone said a number divided by zero was zero and he proceeded to explain why it was not. One of the class jokers went “oh yeah, well my calculator says it’s zero!”. The teachers smiles and says “surely not” and approaches the joker to see what kind of shenanigan he was pulling. And sure as hell he divides five by zero and zero is the result. The teacher, not believing his own eyes, looks at the calculator, then the joker, then the calculator again. The window was open. Figure out the rest yourself.
Ah floating point math. Works fine for 90% of use cases, until it doesn’t.
Hmm really? It’s always worked for 90.0001741894164% of use cases for me
You got an audible chuckle from me on that one
Better calculators just use floating point math with a few tricks on top to pretend it isn’t floating point math.
Weirdly though it wasn’t remotely close to the right answer so I don’t think it was floating point malarkey. I always assumed some defect but I guess we’ll never know.now I wish I had kept it so I could have sent it to Matt Parker for his calculator reviews
First gen Pentium seems like it would be overkill for a scientific calculator but I guess they had to offload those chips somehow.
The ti-84 plus is based on the zilog z80. From 1976. The calculator is still being made, and still costs $100.
A five dollar automatic open umbrella that shot right off the shaft as soon as I hit the button.
Damn, you got a $5 umbrella projectile. Was it reloadable?
Sadly, no. But it was quite disposable.
Pew
Fly swatter that burst in to a million bits the first time I hit a fly.
The other fly swatters will know not to mess with that fly.
ha, been there with this one. why even waste plastic, energy and man hours making it. i bet margins are horrible too.
deleted by creator
A can opener from a convenience store. It was barely sharp enough to puncture the metal of the can and exploded the moment I turned the crank.
Technically, I didn’t buy this, but I feel like it fits the spirit of the thread.
When I was a kid, a friend of mine gifted me an off-brand Super Nintendo controller to me for my birthday. I used it for all of about 5 minutes before it shocked the shit out of my hand and then never worked again.
Considering that a Super Nintendo will not put anything close to being able to shock you out of its ports, I think what actually happened is you shocked shit out of it and that killed it. Cus static electricity n stuff
Could be. I was sitting on the carpet. I’ve never seen anything like it before or since, though.
Could face been a capacitor.
Strawberrys…
On day of purchase they were fine, i put them in a fridge and next day all rotten and moldy…
Do yourself a favor and soak them in some vinegar water after you get them home. About a 1:4 mixture of white vinegar to water. The acidity will kill the mold spores that cause the berries to go bad, and it won’t be strong enough to affect the taste after you rinse them.
I usually just dump about a cup of vinegar into a mixing bowl and top it off with water when I’m getting groceries in. First thing I do is drop the berries in to soak. Then I put away all of my groceries, which gives the berries a few minutes to soak. Finally, I dump the bowl and give the berries a quick rinse with the sink sprayer.
I haven’t had strawberries go moldy since I started doing it. If I forget about them in the fridge for a week or two, they’ll simply dry out instead.
Same here, I bought Strawberries for 50% off at H-Mart, they didn’t even last the night lol.
I bought mine at NETTO
Every vegie or fruit i bought there is always quickly rotten. I even saw rotten lemons and paprika in their isle
