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.
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
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.
haha love this, i had something similar but less explosive with a metal temu garlic press… it completely bent out of shape on the first garlic cloves i used it on hahaha
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
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.
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.
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.
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ha, been there with this one. why even waste plastic, energy and man hours making it. i bet margins are horrible too.
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
Measuring cup from Walmart. Packaging said dishwasher safe. It was not.
Better Homes Food chopper that couldn’t be disassembled to clean it. Potato chunks got pulled up into the housing by the blades and just rotted there with no way to access it. The exact same model is still sold in stores.
I’ve had measuring cups where all the markings come off.
Packaging said dishwasher safe.
Maybe they meant the packaging was dishwasher safe 🤔
A pack of six light bulbs. Five of them sheared right off the metal base like wet tissue when I screwed them in, just one right after the other. Fortunately the last one worked. I was a poor college kid with no transport then, so getting that pack of bulbs for my single lamp was a lot of effort, I was disappointed.
Recycled plastic bin liners. They literally split at the seams as I was peeling them off the roll.
Second place goes to a pair of cheap shoes. Literally walked the soles off them in two weeks.
Third place goes to a pair of nail clippers from a consignment store. The metal bent rather than cut through my fingernails. (Maybe it would have worked better under the red sun of my home planet?)
I’ve had a pair of nail clippers break similarly, but the edge split instead of cutting my nail. I think glass clippers would have been better.
I bought some “Amazon basics” trash bags once. Their sides were not even properly laminated together. Just pulling them off the roll made the sides split open. Never again.
Trash trash bags, hmm.
They were so shit that I couldn’t even use one to throw the rest away. I had to go out and buy some real bags just to get rid of them.
