Most of the disposable toothbrushes don’t have the ability to replace the heads. Some of them do, as the GP mentioned, but most don’t in my experience.
The ability to replace the heads is not the same thing as actually being able to find the heads in the store that sold you the toothbrush.
The entire assembly costs typically something in the same ballpark as a head replacement anyway.
Most of these disposable systems are cheap in every sense of the word (cost and build quality) and not really intended to be used for a long period of time.
From a consumer standpoint, they make a lot of sense. From an environmental standpoint, not so much. How did we get here? Well, Sonicare would probably argue they make a superior brush and therefore can charge more which may or may not be true. More likely the volumes involved combined with the “Upscale”/“Downscale” marketing associated with each brush makes it genuinely much, much, cheaper to create an all-in-one unit that’s only supposed to last a month compared to the alternatives.
Well that’s not really disposable then, that’s just a normal electric toothbrush.
You have to replace the cleaning bits, no toothbrush head is good to use for more than like 2-3 months.
There are two problems here:
Most of the disposable toothbrushes don’t have the ability to replace the heads. Some of them do, as the GP mentioned, but most don’t in my experience.
The ability to replace the heads is not the same thing as actually being able to find the heads in the store that sold you the toothbrush.
The entire assembly costs typically something in the same ballpark as a head replacement anyway.
The entire assembly often costs less to replace on a regular basis than the heads for, say, the Sonicare - $24 for 3 heads at the time of writing, compare this to the $10 two pack of disposable brushes, $8 per unit (plus the cost of the rest of the system) for the “right” way, $5 per unit for the disposable route (all inclusive.)
Most of these disposable systems are cheap in every sense of the word (cost and build quality) and not really intended to be used for a long period of time.
From a consumer standpoint, they make a lot of sense. From an environmental standpoint, not so much. How did we get here? Well, Sonicare would probably argue they make a superior brush and therefore can charge more which may or may not be true. More likely the volumes involved combined with the “Upscale”/“Downscale” marketing associated with each brush makes it genuinely much, much, cheaper to create an all-in-one unit that’s only supposed to last a month compared to the alternatives.