In my twenties I dated an older woman who had just divorced her husband of many years; he was a GE vice president in the branch that sold to builders. She had, of course, all TOL GE appliances still in her home. I remember well that she had one of those GE washers with the Dispensall lid--which she had long since quit using. She said, I remember, that GE had had to replace so many of those lids because they ended up clogging up in all the little doors and ports and that people just went back to doing what they'd always done.
I've seen ads before touting a Norge that had a detergent, etc., dispensing arrangement and apparently Speed Queen also had one for a while.
Did any of these dispensers ever work well? Obviously they weren't a huge hit because they ended up being discontinued. Were there problems, like the Dispensall, with reliability?