Useless mug →
UPDATE: It’s back! See bottom.
A lot of people asked about my 1-star-review coffee mug from this Instapaper tweet yesterday. It’s a custom design I created to amuse myself. The review is fictional, but it’s based on quotes from actual Instapaper reviews.
Zazzle’s printing isn’t very good for small text, so the text is slightly blurry, even though I uploaded a very high resolution image for it. Here’s how mine turned out:
The photo is sharp, but the text isn’t, as you can see compared to this sharp speck of dust:
If you’re cool with that, and you share my strange sense of humor, you can order one of these. I’ll get 10%, the minimum commission that Zazzle would let me set. Maybe I can sell a billion of these to Facebook.
UPDATE 1: After receiving 116 orders for these mugs today, Zazzle canceled all of them, telling every customer (but not me, yet) that it’s an acceptable-use violation: “Design contains an image or text that may be subject to copyright.” This was just something fun, and I don’t have time to battle them on this. Now I just know that Zazzle sucks, and I’ll never do business with them again.
UPDATE 2, April 11: In response to people yelling at them on Twitter, Zazzle reexamined this case tonight, determined that the mug was fine, and cleared it for sale. And if you use coupon-code USELESSMUG50, you’ll get it for 50% off with free shipping, a huge overall price reduction. So if you’d still like it, it’s now available again.