Last week, I whinged about Whole Foods’ bag policy, and now I’m going to pick on a product I buy there. Sorry for the sour streak, but if you’re in New England and looking out the window right now, you’re probably grumpy, too. On the other hand, I cracked a faint smile when I discovered in the course of researching this rant that WFMI CEO John Mackey’s blog has been “temporarily” muzzled since July – not only is JM no longer posting, but comments to the blog have been disabled.

And, by the way, I still haven’t bought a reusable bag. At least not one specifically for groceries. I still get paper bags, at least in part because they are useful around the house, for storing paper to be recycled and for draining fried food, for example.

Which brings me nowhere near my point.

I’ve been using Obsessively Natural Kiss My Face Moisture Shave for some time now. Usually I buy it at Whole Foods, where I discovered it in the first place. I occasionally try another kind of shaving cream/gel/soap, but I pretty much always come back to good old ONKMFMS because, despite the gripe which will follow shortly, it delivers the best shaving experience for me – easy, smooth, injury-free, pleasant-smelling.

Moisture Shave comes in a 4-oz tube for $4.39 (MSRP deduced from Drugstore.com prices, but widely discounted, even by Whole Foods) and in an 11-oz bottle with a pump top for $7.19. That’s $1.10 and $0.65 per ounce, respectively. After trying the smaller size and determining that it was good, naturally I switched up to the one that cost a lot less per shave.

Here’s the problem: the pump is terrible. It’s at an odd angle for one-handed use, it doesn’t do a good job of getting the last of the stuff out, and most annoyingly, it clogs a lot, often causing gobs to squirt out on unpredictable vectors, and potentially leading to Farrellyesque embarrassment.

So, after spending some time obsessively cleaning the nozzle (“why is there a bent paper clip hanging from your toothbrush rack?”) I gave up, tried some other brands, and evetually came crawling back to the 4-oz tube of ONKMFMS. Months, maybe years, passed, and recently, I figured I would try again, maybe they had redesigned the pump.

Same crappy nozzle, different day. One would think that this problem would have come to light somewhere along the line.

On the off chance that anybody is reading who has any pull in this matter, here are my suggestions for Obsessively Natural Kiss My Face Moisture Shave packaging:

• Redesign the pump. Check with just about anybody, since everything else I’ve ever bought in a pump (moisturizer, hand gel, dish soap…) seems to work fine.
• If that’s too much work, just make a bigger tube. For example, Alba makes shave cream in an 8-oz tube. I think I might prefer this size anyway.
• And while we’re rearranging tube sizes, how about a 3-oz tube instead of the 4-oz one? Why? Ask the TSA. (And don’t try to pass off a half-empty 4-oz tube as 2 oz of liquid, that’s terrorist math.) I bet you could charge more than 75% of the price of the 4-oz tube. Maybe more than 100% of it with a “TSA-safe” label on it.