To clarify, I don't mean you ordered apple juice and received an urgent recall message from the seller, or you ordered a jar of beef tallow and received a mailer full of loose fat and broken glass, or you ordered cough drops and received a ten-inch-long silicone tentacle. All true stories, by the way.

No, I mean the item you ordered is exactly what it's meant to be... and as it turns out, what it's meant to be is pretty terrible.

I recently ordered some Vitapod x Paris Hilton drink mixes. I've never heard of Vitapod, but my wife likes Paris Hilton, and I've ordered dozens of drink mixes from Vine. What's the worst that could happen?

As it turns out, they're actual *pods*, and they're meant to be used with Vitapod water bottles. That's what you get for rushing to claim a 0etv. A local Walmart happened to have the Paris Hilton Vitapod bottles on clearance, however, so I picked one up... I figured it was something similar to Cirkul or Air Up. As it turns out, it's much, much dumber.

What you see above is one of the pods loaded into the basket that screws onto the lid. When you screw the lid onto the bottle, a little knob presses into the backside of the pod, forcing out a series of spikes... which detach the plastic seal on the pod, releasing a single measured dose of powdered drink mix. It's the same thing as just pouring a sachet of drink mix into the bottle, but needlessly complicated, and with about ten times the amount of single-use plastic.

Oh, and if you're wondering where the plastic seal from the pod goes... yeah, it doesn't go anywhere, it just floats around in your drink. Better hope it gets stuck to the bottom of the bottle, or it will grab the straw every time you try to take a drink.



What are the worst products you've gotten?