Detergents are sold in bottles that note the number of ounces inside as well as the number of loads of wash the bottle will do.  It turns out that manufacturers have a few tricks up their sleeve to virtually ensure that you don’t get the number of loads the bottles promise.

Trick #1: In the case of 100 ounce Tide, the front of the bottle indicates that you get 64 uses from this product.

 *MOUSE PRINT:

The 64 uses is based on a “medium load”, that is only filling the cap up to line 1, which is roughly one-third full:

Most consumers have big capacity washers and probably don’t do “medium loads” as their normal load, and thus will never get the claimed number of washes for the typical-size loads. Large loads require filling the cap to line 2, and who knows what line 3 is for. Filling the cap to line 2 will only yield approximately 50 uses, rather than 64. Interestingly, line three is the only line that goes completely around the entire inside of the cap, so it is the most visible from any angle, and possibly the one that most people might use.

Trick #2: Related to this, the cap is larger than any load size, so unthinking users who may have been used to products that required you to use a capful of product, will really deplete the bottle quickly. In fact, you will get fewer than 25 loads from the 64 load bottle if you do so. Think this is an accident?

“Take a cap and look at where the lines are—nowhere near the top,” says Adam Lowry, co-founder of San Francisco-based Method. “That’s not accidental. In an extremely mature market like laundry, for established players to grow they have to either steal share or get people to use more,” Mr. Lowry says. “They are trying to dupe people into using more product than they need.” — Wall Street Journal, January 25, 2010

P&G of course denies that its caps are designed to trick users.

Trick #3: Tide defines “load” differently depending on what they are trying to accomplish. Sample packages of Tide Ultra when it first came out were marked “1 Load” and probably did a good job on the average person’s large washload. Large washload? Yes, the amount of detergent in the packet was enough to almost fill their cap to line 2 (see picture below) — for large washloads. So P&G seems to say that one load should be enough to do a large wash when they are trying to impress their customers with a free sample, but they are not putting the equivalent amount of detergent per load in the bottles they sell.

According to the Wall Street Journal, P&G is about to introduce new caps on their various brands of liquid detergent, to make the markings clearer.

For now, just don’t expect to get the promised number of loads if you do normal-sized washes.