Conspiracy Theories
A couple of weeks ago I wrote an offhand remark about toothpaste and received an anonymous comment about toothpaste conspiracies. Since I love conspiracy theories and hadn’t heard about this one I sat down and popped a few queries into my favorite search engine and was sadly disappointed.

I did see a lot of talk about how much sugar is added to major brand toothpastes and since this sounded odd to me I pulled up MajorBrandOfToothpaste.com to see what ingredients are in toothpaste. The site is ugly and giant and about four columns with line after line of informational links which turned out to be a giant exercise in clicking. There was nothing about ingredients. The search tool sucked.

At first I thought maybe it was a trade secret but aren’t the ingredients on the box when you buy it?

During the course of this adventure in time-wasting a box popped up asking if I’d be interested in participating in a survey. “Of course,” I said because I was anxious for the opportunity to tell someone how worthless I thought this website was.

Thirty-seven questions. (37!) For toothpaste. And you couldn’t skip any questions. And some of the questions were like, “MajorBrandofToothpaste.com Has the Most Up-to-date Information on Oral Care” and there was no box to answer, “How the Hell Should I Know?”

Since my question wasn’t answered I decided to try CompetitorBrandofToothpaste.Com and they also had an ugly website with things I had to wait to load, a sucky search tool, couldn’t answer my question AND a survey. The first page said 1 of 12 so I skipped it.