Packaging

I'm stunned on a daily basis by packaging

Hello friends and readers! Mondays, right? I read an interesting article the other day by Michael Estrin entitled The One-Day workweek. that both blew my mind and made me laugh out loud. How much more efficient would we be if we didn’t waste an entire 5-day work week sitting around doing what we could be doing in a day or two? Context for the essay ahead—I wrote it in less time than it takes me to open the average package. I digress, but—Mondays.

Today I’m thinking about packaging. A little ditty (about Jack and Diane…) arising from a weekend of grocery shopping and opening Amazon boxes. When I start complaining about something I try to pause and look within to try to understand what’s really eating at me. Generally, it has very little to do with the thing I’m complaining about—and more to do with something else. Is it my ripe old age and my waning dexterity? Is it my shrinking attention span? In today’s case—fuck no its not—it is exactly about the thing I am complaining about. I hope you enjoy.

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Torn fingernails. Cut fingertips. Stab wounds. Slight tears in the crepey skin on my forearms. All from trying to open fucking packages. I get that this a luxury problem I’m bitching about. Poor me—I had 5 boxes delivered by Amazon, UPS, and FedEx this weekend. Right to my door—well in my case they drop them outside the locked gate at the end of our 1/4-mile driveway. We have acreage and a fenced in yard to keep our rambunctious pack of rescue mutts from terrorizing the neighborhood walkers. It’s a nice little diversion from my writing or other mundane daily activities to take a little stroll down to the gate to find out what wonderful surprises are being dropped conveniently for us to consume or enjoy. Never mind the peculiar and pecuniary privilege of consumption in this way—I’m talking packaging.

Sidebar: does anyone else do this? I completely forget what I ordered in a fit of spontaneous consumption days or a week before—and am pleasantly surprised by the contents of each box. No? Only me? Liars.

Poor me for being able to go to my neighborhood HEB grocery store and peruse the wonderful offerings—fill up my basket—swipe my debit card—and take home a bounty of healthy caloric intake for my household.

To the point I’m bitching about—finally. Packaging. Holy hand wrecker Batman! The box within the box within the box. There’s the box from Amazon. Then—well there’s the other box. Like the Christopher Nolan brain worm film Inception—there’s the layer within the layer. Reminds me of a favorite trick of my parents at Christmases past—hiding a really thoughtful gift in an increasingly smaller box.

Sometimes the hard workers at the local Amazon distribution warehouse pack several smaller items loosely within one large box. Sometimes you get a really small item taped up in a way-too-large delivery box. I can only imagine that their efficiency—or lack therof—might have something to do with the tempo of the music they’re listening to on their AirPods at the time they’re handling your particularly precious order. A little hip hop might lead to a rambunctious taping session—maybe they like the shake-shake-shake of the box just so to match the Jon Batiste cut rattling their eardrums. Maybe it’s a machine doing it that has no rhythm—but also has no sense of what should go together in a box with what.

There’s the box from Amazon. The tape. Usually no problem for my sturdy steel kitchen knife. Then you encounter the product packaging. This tape seems to be manufactured to outlive human existence—far stronger than Amazon’s fibered, recyclable paper tape. Still no problem for my Damascus blade. The damage occurs when I repeatedly believe I can bypass the forged steel tool—and believe I can find an edge and open the little fucker with my fingers. Insanity is defined as doing something over and over and expecting a different result. Yet I try—again. Ouch. Fuck me. Then there’s the plastic wrapper inside. Then the trifold manual written in 7 languages in a font size of 1/2. Then there’s the hard sheet Quick Start guide which is no easier to decipher than the encoded instructions. Some assembly and charging required. My ass.

Don’t even get me started on grocery packaging. Somewhere between the easy to tear-open Oreo packages and the impossible to open without spilling the fucking juice all over the counter kosher pickle jars there exists the screw off—child proof lid with the plastic seal underneath the screw-off—child proof lid. As if one by itself wouldn’t be enough of a seal. No it would not! sez the geniuses at the FDA and the engineers at XYXFUCKYOU company. Whoever made up the terms easy to open and resealable needs a lobotomy. Don’t they buy their own products? Ooh boy that’s another essay for another day.

Every buy anything from Apple? Every single packager in the world must immediately go to Apple packaging class. Brilliant. Unfortunately for most of us—Apple purchases are much rarer than the others that I’m referencing hotly.

Finally there’s the detritus. Weekly the back of the SUV is filled up with cardboard to drop off in the big cardboard recycler smashy place in town. The plastic popcorn and plastic wrapping in another bin. The paper manuals in another—or in the drawer that holds the paper manuals and hides the one you’re looking for 6 months later when you finally use the wonderful time-saving device you ordered back when and promptly shoved in the pantry. The tape ends up in the landfill bin or stuck to the dog’s paws.

Packaging overshadows products. If packaging is your product—take heed! I’m not having it anymore. I’m coming for you—you and your devious and deliberate sorting machine. You and your Eminem-inspired box-pushing pace. You and your overzealous taping. Damn you.

Or I could just stop. Nahhh…