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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.
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
Better calculators just use floating point math with a few tricks on top to pretend it isn't floating point math.
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.
Fly swatter that burst in to a million bits the first time I hit a fly.
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
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 wonβt 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 Iβm 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 havenβt had strawberries go moldy since I started doing it. If I forget about them in the fridge for a week or two, theyβll simply dry out instead.
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?)
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.
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.
A friend of mine made an online store and he started selling ~~e-waste~~ ahemβ¦ various affordable electronics. He wanted me to test a Chinese tablet, and I said yes. This was back in the day when Android Honeycomb was a thing and iPad 2 was a reasonable option, so even the best tablets werenβt that great.
I got the tablet, charged the battery, booted it up, and it was just barely ok. It worked, but it was really slow. I mean, like slower than my first Android phone. This was not even last gen hardware. It was clear that ~~some~~ all corners were cut. The storage, CPU, RAM, bandwidth etc. Every component was the slowest one available.
Anyway, the testing went slowly, as you would expect. It ran out of battery very quickly, because of course it did. Why put large cells or even mediocre quality cells in a cash grab like this. So, I charged it up and continued testing later until it ran out of battery again. Rinse and repeat.
After a few days of testing, It just didnβt boot up any more. Apparently some of those cheap components just couldnβt take the heat that comes with using a battery powered device. Rust in pieces! I hope this abomination gets ground to shreads and drowned in sulfuric acid.
I returned the tablet to my friend and I never heard from it again.
I once bought cheap headphones from amazon without reading reviews. They literally fell apart in my hands as I took them out the packet.
My wife once bought me a Siar Wars action figure from e bay. Yes that's right Siar Wars. He fall apart immediately upon taking out of the box.
At this point, pretty much anything purchased on Amazon. Nowadays even stuff that looks like it's from a legit seller can end up being a knockoff from a scam seller because of their warehouse storage logistics. Or they sell a high quality item long enough to get good reviews on the listing, then switch it out with some cheap piece of shit to take in the dough until the rating is tanked, lather rinse repeat. It's just becoming more and more like Wish/Temu where the listings are straight up lies and they just rely on people not wanting to do through the trouble of a return.
This was a few years back, before I knew this was even possible, but a portable hard drive off of Amazon. Not only was it sharp on all edges, it was only programed to show the storage without actually having it. I spent an evening "moving" docs from a dying laptop, only to plug it in the next day two find a fraction of what I thought I moved over.
Also, a yoga mat that disintegrated when I went to do a plank. Just pressing my hands into it was enough for it to flake apart.
I purchased a hammer at a dollar store once, just to see how bad it was.
I found out when the head of the hammer flew off on a back-swing and put a whole in the wall. The neck of the hammer was made of flimsy, hollow tube metal and the head had only been tack-welded on in 2 places.
Hell yeah dude the manslaughter hammer
I bought a size of pizza from a food truck in DC and it was so bad I threw it away. Which is saying a lot for pizza
A cheap USB 32GB pendrive. It would barely reach 1MB/s transfer speeds and started corrupting files almost instantly.
A knockoff iPhone charger from China. I plugged it into my computer and it literally caught fire.
Purchases from Wish. A pair of block heels where the heel length didn't match the shoe arch. Wearing them meant constantly falling backwards. It was so comically bad, the seller gave me a refund and said don't bother sending them back.
A Gorillaz t-shirt, also from Wish. The picture on the website looked ok. However, what I received was so awful I thought it was a prank. The white shirt had what I assumed was yellow rust stains. It looked like a rag kicked underneath a disgusting kitchen frier and left there for years.
Some of the seams were on the outside and some were on the inside. The print itself was heavily pixilated, as if someone took an internet forum avatar image, blew it up, and stuck it onto a shirt.
A T-shirt a friend gave me when going back from China. It had a small smell, so I put it in washing machine. It end up completely torn in several part... I didn't,t even had a chance to wear it once π€£