The Mysteries of Packaging

Why do I have such a hard time with packaging? Whenever I'm faced with opening something fresh from the store, it's like a Chinese puzzle. Well, actually it's not, because I enjoy puzzles; I don't enjoy trying to get at consumer products I've bought.

It's not that I'm careless and don't try to find the proper mode of entry. Far from it! My family get a major kick out of watching me turn the box over and over, peering desperately at it, looking for some hint such as "Tear Here" or a tab or a minuscule row of perforations. Nothing! Nothing! So I settle upon the most vulnerable spot and go in with all the delicacy and precision of a bear ravaging a campsite.

Sometimes after I'm in, I find the place where I was supposed to have entered. This happened with a box of oatmeal that I bought to make cookies. I could not figure out how to open the damn thing! It was a cardboard tube standing on its base, topped with a plastic ring with a cardboard circle recessed underneath it, and sealed with clear plastic over the top. This one had me totally baffled. The recessed thingie was particularly confusing: because it was so unusual I felt it had to be key, but how? At last, practically in tears of frustration, I plowed through the cardboard circle. Once I was in, I discovered that the plastic ring was part of a lid that seated down in the tube. If I'd placed my thumbs under the outer edge of it and pushed up, the whole thing would've come off. :::sigh:::

Today it was a razor that came, unasked-for, in the mail. It was in a blister pack of stiff clear plastic over cardboard. Ordinarily I would've used the scissors to cut across one end and separated the two, but I was up in the bathroom with no scissors handy. There I was, turning it over and over... Finally I chose a corner, peeled back the edge of the plastic, and got a fingernail under the cardboard. When I pulled, the cardboard peeled apart, leaving part of it still adhering to the plastic -- and the razor still unreachable. Damn! I tried another corner, and this time peeled deeper layers of the cardboard, so that what was left looked thin enough to penetrate with the plug from the hair dryer. With a hole made, I plunged in, breaking two fingernails in the process (my fingernails are useless), and managed to extract the razor.

I seem to remember that years ago, packaging used to include directions on how to get into it. There'd be an arrow, or a dotted line, or a list of instructions. Why don't they do that now? Do they think it's intuitive? (Perhaps it is, for everyone but me.) Or is it a cost-saving measure? (Six Sigma project: if we eliminate the perforations, we save the cost of maintaining the perforating tool and cut x number of seconds off the time to produce each box...) Or is it a generational thing; the packaging is designed by and for people who grew up with video games, or something like that?

Whatever the cause, the effect is that hardly a day goes by that doesn't find me baffled by packaging. On the rare occasions when I do stumble upon the correct way in, I get a warm glow of accomplishment. Failing that, I'll get in the wrong way, sometimes providing a good laugh for my family in the process. So it's all good.