I am using a liquid detergent and I use exactly the half of the detergent they say I should use. If a the washing machine requires 1 cup, I do half. Mostly because I don’t trust the company to put me over their interests.
Now, what will happen? Will my clothes end up staying dirty? Will it not remove stains which a full cup would have removed? Will surfexcel kidnap me and torture me for not obeying their commands? Help meeee!!
Typically one trusts the instructions, but it does depend on the kind and quality of detergent, the quality of the machine, and the amount and types of clothes. I myself just entered an era of having no working machines for two days (on my third and am surviving on a pink hoodie over purple plaid shirt, jeans, and temple garment bra/panties which is my “last life”) because the slots are broken on both home and public machines and do a half-effective job.
Keep in mind that the instructions are written by those who wish to extract money from you.
It’s not like they’re stealing it. They’re just guiding you on how to use detergent.
It’s like saying the people who make microwavable popcorn are extracting money from me because they struggle to take into consideration how the microwave works.
But they’re incentivised to tell you to use more detergent even if you don’t need to, leading you to needlessly spend more money.
You say that like that confirms their intentions or that detergent volume would ever be seen as a universal rule anyways. It’s so circumstantial it challenges the point.
If (hypothetically) they specifically guide you to use more than necessary, thus wasting detergent, theyre making you spend more money on their product, thus extracting money from you.
Microwave popcorn isn’t a reasonable analogue because you don’t “use more product” following their instructions. Maybe hot chocolate is a good example? Every package I’ve bought has suggested using basically 2x as much as I find I need to make a mug of it.
Unless trial and error come into play, which is why I brought up popcorn. I honestly wonder how many of those complaining about this actually do laundry. Too much detergent ends up making the clothes seem like they went through a car wash, so if too much was being used, it’s not like the person wouldn’t know. There also aren’t as many hard rules about it as people think there are to base the idea of some of the purportedly “wrong” specifications on.