Text 34456, 50 rader
Skriven 2009-07-13 21:53:26 av Robert Bashe (2:2448/44)
  Kommentar till text 34448 av Bob Ackley (1:300/3)
Ärende: Coolant (was: Master Cylinders)
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Bob Ackley wrote to Dan Ceppa on Sunday July 12 2009 at 05:17:

DC>> Also, some places don't dilute it.  US anti-freeze is at a 50/50 in
DC>> the  gallon containers that tell you to mix 50/50 with water.
DC>> Straight  anti-freeze used to be sold in a 1 qt container. Marketing
DC>> more or less  forced the 50/50 gal containers into the market.

BA> I think not so much marketing as the fact that most US drivers are too
BA> d*mn stupid to mix the concentrate properly.

Not so stupid as lazy. I can remember back when I was the lab manager of Henkel
in Montreal. One of the Henkel products was Methylan wallpaper paste, which in
Germany is sold as a powder to make up with water.

Now, this seemed pretty logical to me, and I thought it was simple enough to
make up the paste, having sone this myself quite a number of times. No German
is familiar with the product in any other form.

But the sales manager of our operation (interestingly enough a German) looked
at the Canadian market and decided to sell a "Methylan Ready-to Use", which was
simply the powder made up to liquid paste by adding water, allowing the mix to
swell a bit, and stirring until homogeneous. So instead of a small box of
powder you got a large, heavy pail of paste. Naturally more expensive than the
equivalent amount of powder, and not only because of the extra plant labor,
time and packaging: we added a "convenience charge" to the price, too.

I thought that was the stupidest idea I had ever heard and was convinced that
nobody would buy what was essentially water with a little paste in it.

Well, I was dead wrong. The "Ready-to-Use" stuff sold like hotcakes and the
"inconvenient" powder stayed on the store shelves. That taught me a lesson
about North American buying habits I never forgot: convenience is everything.
The less effort, the better - even if the product is more expensive, as it
definitely was.

People really _are_ willing to pay for water in North America, as long as that
saves them even a few minutes of "work".

I figure it's the same kind of thing with the "pre-diluted" coolant. Amazing to
me still, but a fact that can't be denied.

The Germans are totally different in this respect: the only thing you can buy
here that's "pre-diluted" is windshield washer fluid, and even that's sold as a
concentrate that only freezes at -40øC or so and can be diluted with water if
you want.

Cheers, Bob

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