Lauren is upset with Procter & Gamble, the makers of Tide. While detergent pods are a boon to been laundromat customers and people who dislike measuring things. Some people have had trouble with the pods, though. Detergent isn’t supposed to stain your laundry. It’s supposed to do the exact opposite of that. Yet customers say that it’s discrepancies in the instructions that cause problems for pod people.

We know that some small children have been injured or killed after putting the pods in their mouths, which is scary and tragic. Parents, manufacturers, and even governments are working to put a stop to pod-eating. The pods are intended as laundry detergents, and are not intended as snacks, so what’s going wrong here?

Reader Lauren reports that the pods stained her clothing. ‘When I contacted tide I got a response back indicating entirely different usage directions then what is on their packaging,” she tells Consumerist. Here’s that response, alongside the instructions on the package of pods that stained her laundry:

Procter & Gamble, for their part, insist that consumers are just using the pods wrong. Ignore the needlessly complex water temperature directions and just remember that no matter what, the pod always goes in the washer first.

In an e-mail to our freshly laundered colleagues at Consumer Reports a few months ago, a Procter & Gamble representative explained to them that some common mistakes cause the staining, not inconsistent or confusing directions. Nope, nope, nope.

The most common contributors to the development of a blue/purple stain on fabrics is not placing the pac into the washing machine drum BEFORE adding the clothes and/or overstuffing machine with laundry. This is important to ensure machine has enough space to provide the agitation needed for the best clean and to maximize contact with ‘free water’ in the machine.

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