Creative Condiments: The Infamous Costco Onion Dispenser

We know we're lazy when we need a specially designed machine to help us garnish our hot dogs. And what better way to make money then to cater to our work-shy needs?

That's the basis of Costco's famous onion dispensers. They're those big metal boxes that say "ONIONS" in big letters on them. And they're awesome.

All you have to do is turn a handle and out comes a stream of flavour. I can't believe we used to actually lift tongs and manually spread onions in the old. Hah! We were so naive back then...

But seriously, while it may seem like a very trivial little invention, having your onions neatly come out of a little machine lets us bypass so many troubles. I mean, with tongs, a number of things can go wrong:

1. You might take too much and then it’s impolite to put it back so you’ll just be forced to down a double helping of onions.

2. You might spill some. Then you’ll have to scramble from the condiments station before a Costco employee comes, making you feel guilty that they have to clean up your mess.

3. You’ll have a hard time spreading it properly. Usually, unskilled onion-putters just put a big glop on one part of the wiener, and then face the task of spreading the onions evenly with the yucky tongs that have gone who-knows-where.

So I was interested in what else the onion dispenser’s, manufacturer made. I did a little research on the company that makes these babies, Perfection Manufacturing, and apparently they specialize in condiment dispensers. Ketchup, mustard, cheese, you name it, they’ll dispense it.

Wow, there’s a company for everything these days.

Coming Up With Creative Little Ideas: The Life of a Hot Banana Pepper

Believe it or not, you have great ideas everyday.

Some of these great ideas will be patties (refer to the definition on the left). Patties are your million-dollar aha moments, where something just clicks in your brain, and before you know it, you’re piecing together your brilliant new invention. How about the airplane, the email, or the television?

"Hot banana peppers" is the other category these great ideas can fall under. Hot banana peppers are those teensy-weensy ideas that we barely even realize are floating around our heads, despite how important they are to us. Coloring books may not be on quite the same level as automobiles, but shading in princesses sure does make little girls a bit happier.

The point is, hot banana peppers are awesome and you can come up with them with this acronym:

Observe

Remember when your grade 1 teacher continually asked you to listen to her? Well contrary to popular belief, there might have been some substance to what she was saying. To come up with a hot banana pepper, you gotta listen, but more broadly, you gotta observe everything around you.

Find a problem

This may seem a little bit pessimistic to you, but while you’re observing, your goal is to find a problem. Actually, it’s easier to find little problems in life; humans are naturally nit-picky creatures and generally have a hard to looking at the big picture. So just find a little problem— say you’re hiking and you find it annoying that you perpetually have to stop to take your water bottle out of your bag. You don’t want to hold it so you’re stuck with this unbearable situation.

Fix a problem

Hmm… What if I invented a water bottle helmet. It’ll have the water bottle mounted on it, then when I’m thirsty, I can just suck some water out of the tube. Perfect!

And that’s the life of a hot banana pepper, folks!