Asklemmy

A wireless logitech mouse for gaming from back when wireless technology for periferals still meant a decent amount of latency. I learned quickly why latency is important when gaming. Also the precission of the mouse was terrible as it would regularly skip backwards under slightly accelerated movements. It was pretty humbling for me as a ~15 year old kid to realize I wasted around 4 weeks of newspaper work money on a mouse which I gave up on almost the same day as I bought it.

A Logitech gaming headset, I think it was G332. My main headphones broke, and I needed some ASAP, so I went to the local store and bought them as backup ones. The black paint on the padding started peeling off almost immediately and it got everywhere, like sand.

Burger king chicken sandwich with foot lettuce

My Muller hand mixer was designed to break.

Feit light bulbs aren't worth it for any price less than free.

probably not the lowest quality, but an allarm clock from walmart that sheared/tore off the prongs from its plug leaving them in the outlet. (to have some charity I was putting significant strain on it)

Good thread to promote [email protected]

There's probably worse, but off the top of my head, a Sandisk Curzer Fit USB 3.0 drive. It would overheat about 15 seconds into a file transfer and throttle to well below USB 2.0 speeds, perhaps even USB 1.1. I tried to alleviate the issue by using it through a USB 2.0 extender (thereby ruining its entire appeal to compactness), but it developed bad sectors soon enough. It was satisfying smashing it to bits with a hammer though.

A five dollar automatic open umbrella that shot right off the shaft as soon as I hit the button.

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.

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.

Those Dollar Store umbrellas! They are so shit they will break if the slightest bit of wind hits them, or maybe the flimsy metal frame breaks from closing it.

Sure it's from the Dollar Store, but I've bought lots of things from there that have last a decent around of time.

I bought a desoldering iron for a project I was working on. Seemed to work fine although the thing had no power switch and was very uncomfortable to hold. I just needed it for one project so it made sense and I think it had a fair amount of compromises given the savings. Sometimes cheap does make sense

I purchased sunglasses in the Philippines and they broke the same day. I purchased a different pair from a different stand and they broke the same day. Im convinced the defective bottom of the barrel get dumped onto the Philippines

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.

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?)

Might not take #1 spot, but is definitely up there. A pair of Levi's jeans that were worn through in 2-3 days.

A friend of mine made an online store and he started selling ~~e-waste~~ ahem… 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 weren’t 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 didn’t boot up any more. Apparently some of those cheap components just couldn’t 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.

We bought a shower mat that reeked of plastic offgassing, so we left it outside to air out for a month, and it still smelled like shit, so we threw it away.

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.

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.

Barely working solar charger

I bought an ouya. I remember just about everything sucked. It's the thing that came into mind.

A donair from Pizza 73

The thing that immediately comes to mind is a cheap telescoping fly swatter. . Old radio antenna style shaft / handle. The part that’s supposed to swat the flies was a massive square that was way too heavy and had so much drag that it would flop and never hit flat and was too slow because of it. Never once was able to kill a fly and after about the fifth try the handle broke in half and the top flew off launching into the great Beyond. Pretty sure it’s still lodged behind a couch somewhere.

Years ago I bought an angle grinder from Aldi, for about 20,-. After 30 min it started to smell and the enclosure started to melt. I brought ist back still warm and smelling burnt in order to recieve my refund. Although I knew it couldn't be of good quality I expected it to last a little bit longer. If you buy cheap you buy twice.

We got gifted a plastic rack for garden utensils. My mother in law bought it for us from the local supermarket (which has various cheap crap every week). Anyway, we placed a few items in it and it broke in a day. Utterly useless.

I once bought cheap headphones from amazon without reading reviews. They literally fell apart in my hands as I took them out the packet.

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

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.

Coors

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

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