Like many Americans, I brush my teeth twice daily and whenever the situation calls for it. I know what it is like to get to the end of a tube of toothpaste and think, “Why, oh why, does my husband have to squeeze from the middle of the tube instead of the end?” Then I scrape it all to the front where it should be and it ruins about 12 seconds of my day. I think it has been this way since the invention of things in tubes. I know my dad’s best friend told me he used tooth powder when he was a kid and it came in a box. I don’t know what tooth powder is, but it doesn’t sound tube-able.

For all your tube-squeezing needs

Anyway, I found some plastic dealies that you slip on the tube and, as you move it up the tube, it squeezes the last bit of toothpaste out for you. I am not sure that the .00036 cents worth of toothpaste this would save you over six years is worth the $1.77 you pay for two of these devices.

I understand that some people have a hard time making a fist, like those with arthritis, or those with no hands. These people might find squeezing tubes difficult, so something like the tube saver may actually be useful rather than just a money saving method. However, the Squeezit is not a product marketed to a niche demographic of un-handy people, it is geared to the masses.

I know how these mass-geared things work, for I am part of the mass. I have seen what happens to useful-seeming little pieces of junk that you pick up for $1.77. You use it at home for about 45 seconds and then it either breaks or doesn’t work the way you thought it would so you throw it in a drawer full of similar junk and it stays there until the lease on your house is up, at which point you pack all the junk in a box and move it from place to place for about four years and finally one day you open the box and realize it’s all trash, so you put it all in the trash.

Baby-boomers always seem to find things like the Squeezit and give it to their kids. At least that’s the experience my friends and I have had. Then the recipient feels obligated out of politeness to keep it for an amount of time without using or throwing it away.  When a gift costs you space and energy and occasionally money because you don’t want it but can’t get rid of it, economists call it a “dead weight loss”.