I definitely overthink purchases but it's also interesting to consider. I think you make a great point that the dash buttons are a terrible fit for many things. Food feels like a challenge since I have ever-changing dietary needs and desires. I also hate the markup game that Instacart and Amazon play and not seeing a price gives me anxiety.

I immediately think of clothes detergent, toilet paper, shampoo, cleaning supplies with dash buttons--although I move frequently so I did not buy for these instances and I wonder if many people say they would buy them for those and then do not.

But to me, they fit the perfect use case: static location inside a cupboard, there is a fixed amount sent, the demand is inelastic and not seasonal, and the product itself doesn't change much (I don't need to compare when I buy, ever). That sounds perfect to me! I don't want to waste time and energy shopping for these 8 things.

I really wonder why this is the case and I'd love to understand why it couldn't work. Perhaps it was marketed to a more innovative audience and not to the people who do laundry, wash their dishes, etc? I hope I'm not generalizing.

That was definitely the use case for me, specifically for products that I know I can buy in bulk, but don't know exactly how frequently I'm going to need to restock. When my son was younger we had one for baby wipes, and another for nappies. When we got down to the last pack we'd hit the button to have some more delivered, and they'd arrive the next day.

For a while I also used one for cat food, but that's got a regular enough consumption rate that the button was replaced by a regularly scheduled order to ensure that we'd have more just before it ran out without having to think about it.

I have a 2 person household, and I probably buy those above mentioned things like 2 times a year at most, so an order button for a single product would be wasteful.

For people who use a lot of laundry detergent, I would imagine those people would be shopping a lot anyways for everything else they use a lot of, so it wouldn't be inconvenient to manual reorder online or at the store when they're already doing a mass order, and it might be confusing to have a mix of things on auto-reorder, buttons, and manual order.