Facepalm

I fully understand the exchange students' confusion. There's nothing on the label that says or indicates it's a cleaner, and that's a plausible beverage container design.

Oh that is, I also thought that was a drink, what the fuck?

To me it seriously looks absolutely like fruit juice that has baking soda in it for some reason I'm not aware of - maybe health benefits? And if it didn't mention baking soda I would totally expect it to be fruit juice. But apparently it's a household cleaner, and there's also a watermelon version. WTF is wrong with the people who make this shit?

Not gonna lie, from the thumbnail I thought it was a fruity drink too....

This is why people need consumer regulation. Bottles have one shape and soaps another

If not drink, why drink shaped?

(seriously, what even is it?)

I don't know this brand and ngl if I saw that on a kitchen table there is a pretty good chance I'd drink it too. That is downright irresponsible label design.

never mind that, why would you have baking soda in bottles????

It's a tiny package of white powder. What is this insanity?

I'm Canadian and English is my first language. If I didn't see that product in a cleaning products isle at the store, I would be very confused because it looks like a drink and while baking soda is something to clean with, it is also something to bake with. It should at very least have the words cleaner or detergent in equally large lettering on the front label.

What the fuck is a snickerdoodle

To be fair, it does look tasty as fuck.

is this the soda you drink while baking food?

Packaging is definitely cultural as anyone who’s spent any significant time in a different culture knows.

It even misleads within your own culture, like how 80% of the “Ice Cream” packaged in ice cream cartons is actually “Frozen Dairy Dessert”.

Even down here where Fabulosa is common, I occasionally mistake it for juice. I guess people are mortally terrified of "communist conformity" and need the soothing market comforts of 80 flavors of everything all from the same one company, but I would truly love if most products were regulated to come in standardized containers.

Imagine the benefits. You can still have whatever insane labels you want. But now all bottles are instantly identifiable by shape or silhouette. Tall, squarish, and easily pourable, must be juice. Short, round, with embedded poison symbols? Not juice!

All bottles of a type could be easily sorted, cleaned, and reused. No worries about plastic cross contamination.

Each kind of bottle is engineered by a materials science task force to be the right kind and amount of plastic to make this work long term for each purpose.

Because gov. subsidies will help manufacture the standardized bottle and everyone can use them, costs actually go down across industries. The recycling sector could also stand to grow by increased need for logistics and management of standardized waste, which becomes another cheap stream of materials for packagers.

Kids, foreign visitors, the aged or infirm, the inebriated, and others all benefit from faster, easier identification of the kind of material they are dealing with. Again, "Is this food?" is one of life's fundamental questions and what is "society" doing for anyone if it's not at least making that question easier and more reliable to answer?

This reminds me of an old and probably somewhat racist joke, involving a person from [insert low income country here] moving to America and marveling at an American supermarket. Food is so easy to get in America, not like in the old country, and they go so far as to put pictures -- in color -- on the cans and jars showing you what's inside so you don't even have to be able to read the language.

This can has a picture of green beans on it and inside are green beans.

This can has a picture of a bowl of soup on it and inside is that very soup.

This box has a picture of a plate of cookies on it, and inside is a plastic tray with three perfect rows of those exact cookies.

This can has a picture of a baby on it and --

That person went straight back to the airport and booked a one way flight back to the old country at that very moment. All those things people in the old country told them about Americans were true.

Time to pick up some Mr. Yuck stickers.