Biokleen Laundry Detergent

I'll be the first to admit that I like saving a buck or two on things I have to have so I can spend it on stupid stuff I probably don't need.  I'll also admit that like most folks some things I care about brand selection and other things I don't care.

When it comes to laundry detergent, I don't care...give me the cheapest stuff that won't make my skin itch.  Usually that means some brand off the bottom shelf that I've never heard of.  If I'm lucky, they have a "perfume & dye free" variety.  This is how I've lived for years...simply grabbing a bottle or two of the cheap stuff whenever I need some.

Lately I've come to learn that sometime the allegedly more expensive stuff is far better than the cheap stuff.  If my foray into wet shaving with a double-edged safety razor taught me anything it's that sometimes going barely out of your way can pay dividends.

My wife works at Fred Meyer and I do a lot of my shopping there.  We get an employee discount on wide range of products.....except groceries.  Grocery discounts are limited to Fred Meyer/Kroger brands and the nutrition center.  I don't know if you've shopped the Nutrition Center, but they've got a lot of good stuff.  Expensive stuff, but pretty good.  I'm not one to spend big bucks for some items because they have an alleged quality I'm not concerned with.  Some stuff is not worth paying a premium for....and some brands have one helluva premium.

Cleaning supplies in general are way over-priced in my opinion, and the stuff in the Nutrition Center sometimes borders on hippy AND ridiculous.  I don't need a product shat out of a panda's arse, picked up by trained rehabilitated circus monkeys and packaged by blind orphans....even if the product buys carbon offsets and donates 10% to some Charity (unless Charity is the name of the CEO's favorite stripper...then it's just no instead of hell no).

At the local Fred Meyer's Nutrition Center, there is a little workstation for the employee of that section.  We had to inquire about a now-discontinued product and while she was looking up some information I noticed the Biokleen.  It was on sale for 25% off and with the employee discount I figured...what the heck.  Now I should mention that I looked at the product because it was a) there at eye level and b) perfume & dye free.  I'd been itching a bit lately, presumably due to the cheap laundry detergent additives.

Holy cow this stuff is great.  First of all, we get 128 HE loads of laundry out of a single bottle!  I did the math.  Discounting any.....well, discounts, the "cheap stuff" normally runs $3.00 a bottle.  You get 33 loads with that bottle, which means the detergent cost for a load of laundry is 9 cents.  This "expensive" stuff retails for $10 a bottle, which means at 128 loads the detergent cost is 7.8 cents per bottle.  Add the fact that with so many loads per bottle you can probably wait to buy a bottle when it is on sale....and the fact that this is discountable for us, and our normal cost comes to almost half of what the "cheap stuff" costs!

Biokleen products are also about as hippy as you can get, but it still appeals to my quality and cost-sensitive sides.

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