Month: July 2024

“One Size Fits Most“

That was written in medium sized print on 2 boxes of Nitrile Gloves I was throwing away. I couldn’t help but laugh. Then I thought, “What a scam!”

I’m a medium sized man with what I’ve always thought of as small to medium sized hands. My motorcycle and winter gloves have always been “Medium” although this year I’m going to be in the market for new gloves and I suspect that I’m looking at the inevitable “OH NO! You’re wrong again you don’t wear Medium, you wear LARGE don’t you know that????“

 I’ve worn medium sized T-Shirts for years, now suddenly I wear large. You’d think it was because of the middle aged gut, that is a component, but that’s not the whole story.

If I grab a Medium T-Shirt from 8-10 years ago it fits great, even with the middle aged bulge. However a Medium T-Shirt I bought last month didn’t fit in the shoulders, sleeves, or gut. I might as well have been wearing a sausage casing. I exchanged that T-Shirt for a large and it fits. This has been a recurring theme of late.

Like the Nitrile gloves in the recycle bin. “One Size Fits Most” used to mean the item would fit me just fine. Not anymore!

The other half had purchased these particular gloves while I was doing some work on the house. He’d caught them on sale, and had purchased the same brand and size that I was already using comfortably. He’d even gone down into the garage to look at the box containing my dwindling supply.

Then we found another partially used box of gloves and I didn’t get around to opening these boxes until today. They’re over two years old, and were still sealed in their plastic overwrap.

I couldn’t put them on. Literally, they were so tight I couldn’t get my hands into them. If I’d just purchased them, I’d have exchanged them. Given their age… into the trash they went.

I’ve got some large and medium sized latex gloves that will serve the purpose right now. Since they’re Latex, they have a shelf life, so I should use them before they get so fragile as to be useless.

As I was running all this through my brain I came back to the “Scam” thought.

Follow this logic if you will.

If I’d ordered two boxes of the “One Size Fits Most” from Amazon at 1.98 a box, then figured out I couldn’t put my hands in them, I’d have written it off. I’d have ordered the next size up and given the boxes that were too small away. Or I’d have dumped them in the trash because they were too much trouble to box up and return to Amazon.

End result, the vendor sold the gloves, didn’t have to process a return, got to make up a review, and the boxes of gloves ended up in the trash unused. In other words. Scam! 

You could assume they’d been built somewhere in China and OneHungLow was having a bad day. Instead of tossing the poorly made product, these were sold cheap as seconds at a steep but still profitable discount. In the end, the shitty product still made it into an American landfill.

The manufacturer makes money, the Amazon vendor makes money, Amazon makes money, UPS makes money, but me, the consumer, ends up paying to be OneHungLow’s garbage man.

Then my mind turned over this question:

How often does this kind of thing happen? If it’s common then there’s a lot of waste. Even if people return badly made crap there’s the fuel expense of delivering and picking up. Plus all the packaging and labeling and the labor costs. No matter how you slice it bad standards of sizing must cost a fortune.

I’d gotten to the point where I tried on every single pair of Levis because even though they all said 34/30. Rarely were any two pair actually the same size. It’s not just Levis, Wrangler, Lee, and even the off brands from Tractor Supply or whoever. No two pair of pants fit the same. The same is true of shirts, and T-shirts, even underwear. 

I’m a pretty simple guy. I want to grab 4 pairs of jeans from a cubby. I’ll check that the sizes are what I need, then head to the register. I used to be able to do that. I could shop for clothes in 20 minutes. 15 minutes was spent in line and walking in the parking lot.

Same with shirts and underwear. Sizes made sense, they were consistent, and life was easy.

Now, I literally have to try on everything and when I don’t, I have a shirt that looks like I’m in a sausage casing. How the heck do clothing mail order houses stay in business?

But there’s something else to think about in all this.

Our whole society is based on “One Size Fits Most”.

There was a time when that meant something. There was a consistency that could be relied upon more often than not. Now days? Virtually nothing is consistent. Safety is not guaranteed (there was a weird ad in a newspaper titled “safety not guaranteed” it was a promotion for some movie about time travel I think.) 

Well, we’re in the future and safety is not guaranteed, nor is sizing, or building codes, or vehicle standards. Hell, Toyota just recalled 100,000 engines. 

Think about that! Complete engine replacement in 100,000 vehicles. These are standard internal combustion engines. You know, the kind we’ve been building for over 100 years. How do you go so horribly wrong in building one that you have to recall them instead of being able to replace the bad component?

Moreover, how did the design make it through testing and emissions certification and into full production with no one noticing a problem?

Could it be poor standards?

How many of our standards have been allowed to slide because we don’t want to hurt anyones feelings? How many ticking time bombs of failure do we have in our everyday lives because a supervisor or quality person couldn’t or wouldn’t say, “That is Wrong! What you’ve made doesn’t meet the specification.“

One Size no longer fits most.