Whatever Happened To Just Wrapping The Thing?
In honour of yesterday’s Particularly Preposterous Packaging Day, I would like to report that I successfully liberated a set of batteries from their packaging using nothing but a pair of kitchen scissors, a bread knife, and language I’m not proud of.
The batteries themselves took four seconds to actually use. Getting to them took the best part of ten minutes.
I don’t know when packaging became a competitive sport, but somewhere along the way it did. What used to be a simple cardboard box has become a hard plastic clamshell, heat-sealed on all sides, apparently engineered by someone who has never once tried to open one themselves. There’s a name for the injuries these things cause — “wrap rage,” they call it — which tells you everything you need to know about how successful this whole system has been.
It didn’t used to be like this. A box was a box. You opened the flap, the item fell out, and everyone got on with their day. Somewhere between then and now, somebody decided that the item needed protecting not just from the delivery van, but from the actual human being who paid for it.
I made myself a coffee halfway through the battery incident, mostly to give my hands a rest from the scissors, and stood in the kitchen wondering what committee sat down and decided this was progress. Because that’s what it always is, isn’t it — a committee. Somewhere, someone in a meeting said “what if we made it tamper-proof, theft-proof, and completely proof against the customer as well,” and everyone nodded, and here we all are, ten years later, attacking a toothbrush with a Stanley knife.
I’ll admit, before anyone points it out, that I’m not entirely innocent here myself. I bought a phone case last month with so much anti-theft packaging wrapped around it that by the time I’d got it open, I’d lost the will to actually put the phone case on. It’s still in a drawer. Unopened, ironically, by the packaging’s own design.
There’s probably a reasonable explanation buried in there somewhere — shoplifting prevention, product damage in transit, some genuinely sensible logistics reason nobody ever explains to the person standing in their kitchen with a bread knife. I don’t doubt it made sense to somebody, in a meeting, on a spreadsheet.
It just doesn’t make much sense to me, standing here with a small cut on my thumb and a mild sense of triumph over a packet of double-A batteries.
Still, I got there in the end. Coffee in one hand, battered batteries in the other. A small victory, hard won, entirely unnecessary.
Anyway, what do I know? I’m just a grumpy old man.
Go on then — what’s yours? The packaging, the phone menu, the printer that only breaks on a Friday? Tell me what’s got you reaching for a stronger coffee this week.
