Toothpaste Tube Design

How come in 2008, we’ve put a man on the moon, we’ve got wireless, well, everything and virtually everything else is streamlined, efficient and beyond our wildest dreams, but no one, I repeat NO ONE has yet invented an efficient toothpaste tube?

Sure, the old one from 50 years ago still works, but, some designs still have a removable cap (one drop in the bathroom and the whole tube gets tossed), the tube design is completely medicine cabinet UNfriendly, taking up an entire shelf wasting both width AND heighth as it can’t stand on an end, and virutally all the current designs still require two hands to open. Besides, you still have to do that familiar “tube squeeze” to get the toothpaste in a near-empty tube up to the top where the cap is, and then roll up the flaccid (for lack of a funnier word) part of the tube so the toothpaste doesn’t re-settle there. Ugh.

The ketchup guys (and some of the shampoo guys) finally figured out that their product settles on the BOTTOM of the dispenser, so they’ve cleverly flipped the bottle and put the cap on the bottom, but none of the toothpaste manufacturers have solved this one yet.

Maybe they should have a contest so all the out-of-work-yet-genius inventors out there have a shot at this. Or maybe I should just accept that this will probably not change until they add toothpaste to soda so every American gets his teeth fully brushed with each can of Coke.