Also, dangerous sweatshops in poor countries that employ eight-year-olds become praiseworthy if they provide the children with better outcomes than the children would otherwise receive.
This is actually a serious, mainstream policy argument that I've heard several times. It goes like "If you ban sweatshops, sweatshop workers won't have better jobs; they'll just revert to subsistence farming or starve to death as urban homeless". I'm not getting into whether it's a correct analysis (and it probably depends on where and how exactly 'sweatshops' are 'banned'), but my point is that it wouldn't work quite well as an "outrageous" example.
Interesting observation: You talked about that in terms the effects of banning sweatshops, rather than talking about it in terms of the effects of opening them. It's of course the exact same action and the same result in every way- deontological as well as consequentialist- but it changes from "causing people to work in horrible sweatshop conditions" to "leaving people to starve to death as urban homeless", so it switches around the "killing vs. allowing to die" burden. (I'm not complaining, FYI, I think it's actually an excellent technique. Although maybe it would be better if we came up with language to list two alternatives neutrally with no burden of action.)
There are a lot of explanations of consequentialism and utilitarianism out there, but not a lot of persuasive essays trying to convert people. I would like to fill that gap with a pro-consequentialist FAQ. The target audience is people who are intelligent but may not have a strong philosophy background or have thought about this matter too much before (ie it's not intended to solve every single problem or be up to the usual standards of discussion on LW).
I have a draft up at http://www.raikoth.net/consequentialism.html (yes, I have since realized the background is horrible, and changing it is on my list of things to do). Feedback would be appreciated, especially from non-consequentialists and non-philosophers since they're the target audience.