The BetterBasket

This is a lingering product from our Daily Grommet weeks. The name says it all. A laundry basket that is superior to the baskets of yore — it has three partitions, doesn’t crack like hard plastic ones, can be held with one hand and drum roll …. it folds down into the size of a folded newspaper. I don’t care whether you live in a mini Manhattan apartment or a McMansion, nobody should take up precious real estate with laundry baskets.

As with so many cool Daily Grommet products, this one was built out of frustration with the status quo — that being rigid, plastic laundry baskets! Tom Goth, dad, plastics expert and likely his household’s laundress, set out to create a BetterBasket and this is the result. You can get the product at Daily Grommet. Their website is a little more user friendly than BetterBasket’s site and they seem to have a 2-compartment and 3-compartment option.

I thought another great trait was that it is see through so that when you’re carrying it up and down stairs, you can see where you’re going. Those slits in the plastic ones only show so much! It retails for $24.95 on its own website, Laundry Alternatives, which isn’t expensive. It’s about $15 more than the typical hard plastic ones, seen to the left. I have to get one for my apartment because right now my cleaning lady uses an oversized Container Store plastic bag to slide the laundry to and fro, the laundry room in our building when she does laundry.  

Classics and Funs will have a difficult time parting with perfectly good — read: useful and practical — laundry baskets. Even a few Smarts and Organics could as well. Nobody is made of money. But, my advice to all is to borrow the immortal words of the great philosopher, Beyonce, “Let me, let me upgrade you.”