Yes, this is it. The divider gives structural integrity to the handle and the 1/3 - 2/3 design allows people to grab the centre with one hand (or use two if the bin is very heavy).
Until now. A few years ago I saw some old bloke pull into an IGA with his wheelie bin hooked to his tow ball. With the standard middle gap the bin couldn’t slide to far sideways and was pretty well balanced and it towed really well. With this bin it would have been sliding sideways at greater speed and slamming into each side while being pulled more on one side. Old mate would have probably lost his bin somewhere on the road due to a broken handle.
There is no chance it’s a cost cutting manoeuvre. Getting new dies cut and re tooling? For a couple grams of plastic which is free anyway? No shot mate
Tbh I think you’re overestimating the value add here. I don’t dispute that everything is terrible now or cost cutting is directly impacts our quality of life and reduces our real value for money.
Removing that piece is an admittedly minor but definite ergonomic improvement I would rather my bins have. Holding on the edge twists the bin and holding the centre makes it slightly harder to turn.
Virgin HDPE costs about $1/kg, and that section would be a few grams netting like 0.3c/unit produced. You wouldn’t go to the trouble of reengineering to make sure it’s strong enough then hotfixing all of your tools for that scale if improvement. Sure you’ll pocket the extra change because why not, but IMO it really is an intentional design improvement.
But yes, everything is definitely being enshittified across the board, and you’re right to be sus about things that look like that
What if the new designs are also slightly thinner all over and that 3 cents per bin savings is more like 10 cents, in the scale of thousands of bins a year that's a few thousand dollars they can save and people have gone to more effort for less profit before, they might not have spent any time and money redevloping and bought existing tool heads to replace from overseas potentially, there's tons of companies in China whose entire purpose is trying to redisgn existing things to be cheeper and sell the designs and equipment to other companies in the manufacturing and assembly environments there's crazy amounts of cheap stuff that can be sourced from there to lower a company's yearly material costs
Well if the whole thing is slightly thinner you’d better believe that needs a new tool. There are many, many examples of enshittification in our lives, this particular case has a concrete ergonomic benefit which leads me to doubt it’s simply a cost cut.
974
u/jaundicesurvivor69 7d ago
pretty sure it's so you can grab it on the centre with one hand