Cheap wine box full of Mobil1

Mobil1 Oil in a cheap wine box?  Yes.  You are reading this correctly.  Let me explain…

Today was oil-change-day for my wife’s Equinox and my Camaro as well.  I headed early this morning to Wally-World to see what was available.

The Equinox takes 5 quarts; the Camaro takes 8 quarts.  So normally I would buy my favorite 5 quart containers but today, i found something new…  Turns out some genius at the Mobil oil marketing department, came up with the brilliant idea of packaging 12 quarts (yes a dozen) of Mobil1 in a cheap wine box.

For those of you that don’t know what I am talking about, head out to the wine section of your favorite  local grocery store and find the “boxed wine” shelf.  That is where you can find the cheap wine packaged in a heavy cardboard box holding a “bag” full of wine.  Even comes with a nifty spigot that helps dispense the product.

I am a bit of a wine snob and this is the ultimate insult for what Galileo called “sunlight trapped in a liquid”.  No matter how humble wine is, it should be respected enough to be properly bottled.  But no.  The cheapest of the cheap has to suffer the indignity of being packaged in a plastic bladder stuffed in a cardboard box.  And now, they have done this to Mobil1.

What made this worse for me was that I didn’t realize the box contained a plastic bag full of oil.  No.  I learned of this when I got home and noticed the box had a “don’t cut this box with a knife” warning.  That is when I realized you have to carefully open a flap on the front of the box, then reach in the box, grab the spigot and gently pull it out.  Then after that, diligently place the spigot it in the proper position.  Made me think of something else you have to carefully grab and gently pull out before you can put it in the right position. 😉

The Good:

All this wonderment for $49 and change.  Not too bad, right?

But the deal goes downhill very, very quick from here.  I did buy a 5 quart bottle and fortunately that jug came with a handy with a way to measure off individual quarts by looking at the tick marks on the side of the plastic container.  So I dispensed the 5 quarts in the container first, and used the empty container to help figure out how much I had to use from there.

The Bad:

And here is where the “deal” goes south even more quickly.

Dispensing expensive synthetic motor oil should not be from a plastic bladder.  You see, that spigot in the picture above is not at the lowest point in the bag.  This means that when you think you have dispensed every drop of goodness…  Think again…

Open the “empty” box and we find this…

Too much Mobil1 to waste…  But how can we get this out?

Yep.  Quite a bit of expensive oil is still in the bag.  Surely you don’t throw this away!  So, I had to get pair of scissors and very carefully open an exit for this bit of oil.  Of course, if you don’t get it just perfect you end up making a mess.  Oh and that is not the only way to make a mess…  The spigot leaks every time you open/close that valve!

Take Aways…

You might ask why I am making such a big deal out of something so trivial.  Especially when there are so many things wrong with the world today.  Well, this is an epic fail on the part of the Mobil oil company.  Just think of the thousands of folks out there that don’t read the directions and cut into the box just to have 12 quarts of oil go everywhere.  Expensive lesson (to the tune of $49) to learn, huh?

The 5 quart plastic jug is the hands-down winner.  You can use it as a measuring device (thanks for the tick marks on the side) and it is easy and convenient to use.  I suppose the ultimate solution would be to save 5 quart jugs and refill them from a “cheap wine box of Mobil1”.

But no.  There is something very wrong about fumbling about trying to pull the spigot out of that box…

Any guess on what kind of ratchet we have here?