The demanding customer

Am I really the only person who's ever noticed that dishwasher soap trays all suck?

I went to my contractor's preferred appliance store today, to place my overdue order for kitchen appliances. Apparently someone coming in with a detailed list of part numbers and features, with a kitchen designed around those appliances, cabinets ordered and installed and appliance-ready, isn't common. Every attempt the salesman made to do his job and talk features was met with a barrage of pros and cons. Never has a salesman had such an easy job -- all he had to do was write up the order. $10,000 worth of appliances in 10 minutes.

But the actual write-up gave me enough time to wander around the showroom and fiddle with appliance controls. Pull here, twist there....I idly played with a Thermador dishwasher's soap tray and discovered that when you move the tiny little blue latch over to open the soap door, it springs onto your finger, and it's sharp. Well that sucks, I thought. Then I noticed that our future Bosch dishwasher had the same exact mechanism. And that most of the high-end dishwashers had it too.

This led to a one-by-one rigorous test of every dishwasher there, and I was shocked to see that most of them have the same crummy cheap-sh*t pieces of plastic for the soap tray. Some have a flip-top and latch that won't close if so much as one tiny ball of dry powdered detergent gets on the latch, and it will unless the door is perfectly horizontal when the detergent is poured, and you pour very carefully. Others have this obnoxious slippery tiny little finger-eating latch, that also won't close well if dry detergent gets in there. We use liquid soap now for that reason, and I don't like it -- it's gooey and slimes your fingers when you open the top, and it smells bad, and why should you have to use it?

The salesmen (by now two were involved) didn't know what to say -- every complaint I had was completely legitimate, they agreed. One salesman said he puts dry detergent into a sugar dispenser and pours it from there. Why should you have to do that with a $1600 dishwasher?! Why does a $1600 dishwasher depend on a 50-cent piece of plastic serving an essential function?! They agreed, but what are we going to do about it?

Dishwasher soap trays are a secret monopoly: the two or three designs out there are made by the same company in China for a few cents each. (I don't know that for a fact, but test them for yourselves and you'll agree.) But they both said I'm the first customer they've ever encountered who's ever actually talked about it. They seemed to find it amusing, actually.

Now, don't even get me started on medicine cabinets. Apparently I'm also the first person to question why most medicine cabinets have only 3" deep shelves!