Last night I made myself a great looking
salad. I loaded it with a variety of
vegetables, olives, feta cheese, croutons, dried cranberries, and topped off
with some chick peas. It looked fabulous
and only lacked the dressing. Popped
open the fridge and spotted a brand new bottle of creamy Caesar. One of my greatest fear now faced me. What evil or probably stupid thing has the
design engineer done to with the bottle to make my life miserable? He didn’t disappoint. A paper label wrapped the top of the
bottle. The glue used for this could
probably be used to hold an airplane together.
After laboriously removing it, I then easily unscrewed the plastic pour
cap from the bottle. Now even more
challenges faced me. A little piece of
plastic now had to be removed by lifting it off using one of three or four tiny
little tabs. Just try and get a grip
using a tab that’s 1/8” long. After
screwing them all up without removing, it was now necessary to pull out the
heavy artillery, knife and scissors.
Mission finally accomplished, the dressing was now exposed after my
usually cursing and blood pressure rise.
I know it shouldn’t bother me this much, but
it’s only an example of modern packaging.
You can no longer open things without using some kind of tool. Even a lousy jar of pickles has some plastic
crap over the edge of the lid. Is
someone out there anxiously waiting to PMP (poison my pickles). Blister pack,
bubble pack, you name it, every possible means to get us inside those
packages. Even liquids are in containers
that need have its plastic top strap broken before the cap can be fully
removed. Happens with wine in screw tops
where a ring of wire must be snapped.
Now that’s a real problem, now they’re even affecting my afternoon
drinking habit. I could go on and on
with examples of problems with today’s packaging. I realize that most of this situation is
caused by them trying to secure our health and safety, but I do wish the people
designing these packages would try opening them and see what we go through.
Why all this security in packaging? Blame Tylenol! Back in 1982 there were a series of poisoning
deaths resulting from drug tampering in the Chicago metropolitan area. Seven
people died from ingesting Tylenol-brand acetaminophen capsules that had been
laced with potassium cyanide. No suspect
was ever charged or convicted of the poisonings. Tylenol, followed by many other companies
began dramatically changing their packaging to make product tampering extremely
difficult without making evident any tampered materials. Since then it’s become difficult to keep the
bad guys out and not affect the rest of us.
