When I say “Dawn dish soap”, what’s the first thing that comes to mind?
- You might say, “Blue.” Makes sense, that’s the color Dawn usually is.
- You might say, “oil covered ducks.” Sure. Yeah. Dawn is used for wildlife rescues during oil spills.
- Then, almost completely dependent on your age, you might say, “soaking dishes.”
Why?
The answer requires a fast and scenic deep dive into systems thinking. Hold your breath, we’re going in.
Dish-Washing Action Hero
If you go at your dishes like Tom Cruise running after a helicopter (that is: immediately after taking them out of the oven with a sponge and a drop of Dawn), it’s gonna take 4x longer and a lot more elbow grease. That’s exactly what an entire generation of folks, generally starting with millennials, did when using Dawn. No soaking. Just endless scrubbing, hoping the next drop would be the one.
Soaking dishes takes time. It’s a luxury – if you could call doing dishes a luxury – that most folks just don’t have time for. In fact, LG commissioned a study in 2022, detailed in the New York Post, which found a 10-percentage-point discrepancy between generations in how acceptable it is to leave dishes in the sink before adding them to the dishwasher.
The younger you are, the more time you leave a dish in the sink to “scrub immediately” while simultaneously also never soaking it. The average dish stayed in the sink for a day and a half before being cleaned.
Procter & Gamble created Dawn for a world where you take time to soak your food-caked dishes in a sink full of Dawn-y water, then lovingly scrub them down, and place them on your rack to dry. For entire generations, This Was The Way. And if that’s not a Martha Stewart-esque pipe dream in 2026, I dunno what is.
Millennials and Gen Z looked at that whole process and went, “Fuck that noise!” while going full Mr. Miyagi at 4x trying to willfully wax-on/wax-off their dishes into submission.
Martha Stewart’s Extended Release Nightmare
New entrants (Hello Mrs. Meyer’s!) began to erode Dawn’s market power. These new entrants had characteristics matched to immediate scrubbing (a wild lineup of scents, clear soap, and artistic labels that look good when left out). And you could almost hear the customer’s gears grinding:
- Maybe this cool new scrubber will get food gack off faster. Can’t use metal, it just damages the pan.
- Maybe this new kind of pan will truly, finally be “non-stick”. Huh, look at that, we invented PFAS.
- Maybe fancy smelling soap will make the chore more tolerable. And your psychologist will tell you it’s supposed to be a transcendental mindful meditative experience.
Except that people still fucking hate scrubbing dishes.
Your dishwater can smell like summer berries and orchard apples all you want. You can have the funnest-looking seasonal Scrub Daddy shaped like Baby Shark. Scrubbing this morning’s scrambled eggs out of the so-called non-stick diamond-coated PFAS-free pan is still a 20-minute misery session that no amount of mindfulness can ameliorate.
A 2019 OnePoll survey found folks hated scrubbing off caked-on food (44 percent), feeling like dishes aren’t clean (42 percent) and the time it takes to clean dishes (32 percent). A full third of people hate using a sponge (31 percent). This same survey showed that 69% of people hated it so much they left the dishes to pile up and caused themselves stress and frustration anyway.
At every turn, we are actively told that we’re doing it wrong and have empirical evidence to back it up – and every new tool seems to compound the suffering.
A minor but related segue here about Pyrrhic optimism regarding your chosen habits: a tiny study in 2025 tracked developers utilizing AI tools while coding. These programmers believed they’d see a 24% speed gain at the start of the experiment; the developers perceived that they were 20% faster, but in reality were 19% slower.
And as my buddy Brad astutely pointed out that historically the fancier our tools got, the more chores actually landed on women’s plates, backed up by the March 1988 issue of New Internationalist, citing a 1974 Vanek study:
In the 1920s women in the US spent an average of 60 hours a week doing housework. By the 1970s housework [required] an average of 70 hours a week. In 1925, when most clothes were washed by hand, women spent 5.5 hours a week doing the laundry. After the invention of the washing-machine the time had gone up to 6.25 hours.
The technical term for this from a systems thinking perspective: fucking yikes.
Not only do we have a highly undesirable and burdensome task which reoccurs multiple times a day, inaction creates exponentially compounding consequences, and the regular completion of the task is a prerequisite for being able to do basic things like cook and eat food.
People, in general, do not like to be told what to do. Doing dishes represents the daddy of all dictated duties.
P&G: “Hold My Beer.”
Procter & Gamble, watching their market share erode with no gain to the customer, watching folks hate scrubbing dishes, watching folks simply opt out of the chore itself… took a look at the market they’d served for 45 years and began prototyping a product to end the suffering and misery.
Five years later, in 2019, P&G premiered Dawn Powerwash Dish Spray and sent a press release about it, complete with a professional chef quote: “Sometimes you just don’t have time to do a ‘proper soak’” outlining how Powerwash eliminates that need entirely. You just spray, wait like 10 seconds, and then scrub.
No guilt, no judgement. Just a product perfectly matched to a deeply entrenched problem.
Now for a personal question: What was your reaction to the introduction of Dawn Powerwash?
If you do dishes regularly, and I do, it’s fucking magic. Yeah, soaking your dishes is fine, but sometimes you gotta get the same dishes ready for dinner after meal prepping. P&G, for an extra dollar or two for the container and spray pump, figured out how to gift you back hours of your life each week with a magic spray bottle.
Mission Accomplished?
Predictably, the news comes swooping in with a, “Listen, assholes*, you’re using Dawn wrong, and you’re doing your dishes wrong.”
*I’m taking some liberties with their take on the story here, but most of the coverage from this particular P&G press release played on the same message – the original CNN story which seemed to be the first to use that tagline is long gone, but here’s coverage from around that time on Denver7: https://www.denver7.com/news/national/dawn-says-youre-washing-your-dishes-wrong
Judgement starts in. Folks who’ve spent lifetimes soaking their dishes chide folks who adopt the new tool.
“How dare you be so precious about your own time that you can’t be bothered to soak a pot? Back in my day we had to use three donkeys and our favorite shirt to scrub our dishes clean…”
Goodness sakes. Soaking dishes sucks. The elbow grease required to de-gack your dishes sucks so much that we’d literally rather clean the shitter. And so all that drudgery is *checks notes* still our problem? That we tried and then regretted our PFAS cookware, our metal utensils, drowned our phones while trying to restart the Mindful Meditation Dishwashing App, and no matter which way we turn, it’s just… a me problem?
I Reject Your Reality And Substitute My Own
How many times has this particular pattern repeated? Across how many different markets? Across how many different disruptive new systems and tools? Any time a disruptor enters, outrage and indignation ensue.
Home gyms and streaming fitness services, laundry washing and drying machines, delivery services for groceries, mental health counseling, digital books, GLP-1s, AI. Each generated pushback. Each generated outrage and indignation and episodes of South Park.
Granted – and I mean this – there are downsides to overdoing anything on that list, but each item on the list may or may not be for you.
Repeating patterns are the signal there’s a system nearby. Outrage and indignation to change are a system. We can get caught up in its effects, or we can look for ways to leverage the system.
When You See Patterns Repeating, See A System.
This is especially true if you’re being told “You’re doing it wrong.” If a disruptive new system does intersect with you somehow, the critical systems thinking questions become: who benefits from the system staying the same? Who benefits when it’s disrupted?
Let’s do this now, together. Let’s ask these questions with regard to these systems:
- Outrage and indignation around change
- AI reshaping your workload
- Dawn Powerwash entering the chat
Who Benefits: Outrage + Indignation?
Outrage and indignation are powerful marketing tools. Ragebait skyrockets traffic at the expense of brand loyalty. So much so that LinkedIn tweaked their entire algorithm to disincentivize it. So. Who benefits?
When it comes to outrage as a status-quo: the social networks win. If you rush to Facebook or Instagram or TikTok to see what your friends have to say about the latest controversy, those platforms are happy to serve you up a ton of ads alongside that content. They benefit directly.
When it comes to disruption: your peace, and also LinkedIn win. LinkedIn went a different direction with their shift towards disincentivizing shallow engagement. And in a world where Instagram and TikTok exist, LinkedIn continues to hold its own and is increasingly seen as a valuable platform to engage in away from the outrage and nonsense prevalent on other platforms.
Note that there’s no value judgement here – that’s all subjective. We’re just turning the rock over to see what’s underneath.
Who Benefits: AI Reshaping Your Workload?
Nobody wants AI to replace their favorite author or artist, but I would posit that most folks would drastically prefer to hand off a routine clerical spreadsheet categorization task to save an hour.
So let’s ask: who benefits if you do the spreadsheet? The answer to those questions isn’t black and white. And here’s why: on directed duties, “this is how we’ve always done it” could be a valid defense in the name of safety and standardization. If the task you offload to AI is skilled vs clerical, you run the risk of losing your skill over time. There’s also privacy concerns. If I use Dawn Powerwash, P&G doesn’t suddenly gain the knowledge of everything I’ve been eating that week in the same way that Google, Anthropic, or OpenAI do when I use Gemini, Claude, or ChatGPT.
And if you let AI do the spreadsheet? You probably get some time back, assuming you have the skill to prompt well and the task is capable of being performed by AI. Arguably, your value for a particular skill is entirely subjective. If you value your time for art more than your time for spreadsheets, and you allocate accordingly to offload spreadsheets to AI in favor of you doing more art, that’s a subjective win. Similarly, if your deliverable is of a higher quality or more thorough or more efficiently performed, you also benefit from that outcome.
Again, no value judgement here. The goal is to untangle ourselves from the “hot take” and see the system. It’s the only way to get clarity on real choices and their consequences.
Who Benefits: Dawn Powerwash
Who benefits if you soak your dishes? P&G, by way of Dawn, has a ridiculous amount of the market share for dishwashing soap (around 60-66% of households). This product category isn’t exactly volatile – active consideration is required for you to want to shift your soap and habits. Plus, there’s some benefit to the actual mindful meditative aspect if you truly, deeply believe in doing dishes by hand that way.
Who benefits if you use Powerwash? P&G won’t stay dominant if they don’t stay hip to the way the kids do the dishes these days. Dawn Powerwash was introduced in late 2019. Between 2020 and 2021, P&G reported $150 million in sales. It was immediately integrated into many folks’ dishwashing routines; around 20-25% of households use Powerwash, representing about 80% of the market share for the product category.
At the same time, Powerwash costs more for arguably “less” product. A true apples to apples comparison is hard because the usage is so different, but Powerwash costs roughly double per ounce vs regular Dawn – but P&G is cleaning up in more ways than one.
As previously mentioned, entire generations of dish washers now have a shiny new tool which frees up significant amounts of time that would have otherwise been spent soaking and scrubbing.
It’s All Subjective + Personal
Is 75% of the market (the folks who don’t use Dawn Powerwash) doing it wrong? Is the other 25% doing it right? No. Powerwash either fits into your process or not. If you feel a deep connection to your family traditions from soaking your pots and pans and passing that method along, you’re going to continue to do that. Or you might do both.
More than half of the users of Dawn Powerwash still use the dish-soaking method. It’s a both-and.
You might balk at the thought of allowing Claude access to your email, but you might ask ChatGPT that medical question.
From a systems perspective: the wrong way for you doesn’t fit with your model of the world or situation. Pretending it’s the “wrong way” for everyone, all the time, always, rather than just you, in this moment, with your specific context, is being precious about your preferences.
And when we do that, we’re holding ourselves and those we serve back from a tool that may be a better fit.
Draining The Sink
From a systems perspective, what can we learn about Dawn Powerwash?
When you see patterns repeating, especially if you’re being told you’re “doing it wrong”, see a system. Then ask the critical questions.
Broken systems, whether it’s soaking and scrubbing dishes or mindnumbing menial tasks, deserve to be disrupted. When they are, we can evaluate and it’s worth a critical look at who benefits if those systems are and are not disrupted.
