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Plastic Packages Cause Injuries, Revolt
massysett writes "Everybody has been frustrated by plastic retail packaging that's nearly impossible to open. New toys and electronic gadgets arrive encased in plastic bubbles. Manufacturers say the packages protect goods and make them look nice, but opening them can be difficult enough to cause injuries that land people in the emergency room. Manufacturers have an appropriate term for the frustration: wrap rage. One man even invented a cutter designed specifically for cracking open plastic clamshells."
Not only are these packages hard to open, many are difficult to recycle. What a waste of petroleum!
Alternately, they insist that the obviously-enormous forces you used to open the package must have damaged the product, so it's not their problem.
Yeah, both are bogus and if you stand up for your rights you get action -- but what do you want to bet a lot of people don't?
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
I find the best way to remove the extra glue which stays behind is to use the sticky tape which came off, or an piece of packaging tape and keep applying it and pulling it off the stickum until it's all removed. Sometimes you may need to burnish the packing tape over the residue a bit, but it gets the job done and you've only wasted about 5 minutes of your life for the bastards who think this is an appropriate way to conduct business
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
but opening them can be difficult enough to cause injuries that land people in the emergency room.
Oh, gimme a break. A pair of scissors applied in the correct spot will open just about anything you can fit on your lap (you may need something more heavy-duty for larger items, I will admit).
As the bigger problem here, many stores balk at taking back defective goods if you've turned the packaging into confetti. Given that we have packaging so sturdy that you can't remove it without reducing it to a pile of ragged plastic strips, that makes it difficult to take back most products (although in most states, they legally must take it back if defective, and that includes software/dvds/cds - Look up "warrant of merchantability" and your state's laws on the subject - "State law" trumps "store policy" every time).
Personally, I think every product should have a sort of magic pull-string... Just untape the string and pull it, and the otherwise-invulnerable packaging neatly falls away in two or three tidy chunks to reveal its contents (and which, with a bit of care, you could reassemble the packaging enough to return it to the store without much fuss).
For opening those plastic bubbles, I use EMT shears. You can get them at a hardware store and they aren't expensive. (I think I paid US$3 for mine.)
For round bubbles, I take my pocket knife and punch a starter hole, then switch to the EMT shears to open the package. But often there is a flat heat seal around the package, and you can simply take cut the seal part off and get the package open.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
if they could just create something to unwrap the Barbies - It takes 20 minutes to untie all of the metal bands and plastic ties. (Before you ask, I have two daughters.)
This message was brought to you by "Lack of Sleep."
"I don't know if the intent is to be clever with packaging, prevent theft, but it's gotten so bad I have started factoring in how much pain the packaging looks to promise vs. how much I want the product. Sounds silly, but after a few plastic cuts for a couple of two-buck knick knacks..."
There are reasons to use these plastic gimmicks;
1) It is easy to package and can be done mechanically.
2) It is difficult for a thief to nick it.
3) It is bulky so if the thief stuffs it in their pocket, it is easily identifiable.
4) Items in it stay where they were put when encased. This prevents damage when shipping as well as makes display uniform.
and lastly...
5) Nobody really has taken corporate management to task for this so reasons 1-4 outweigh 5.
The only question I got is does the plastic really need to be that thick?
B.
This is a sig. This is only a sig. Had this been an actual sig you would have been informed where to tune for more sigs.
Sorry, tried to un-UK the link, forgot the domain name.
For packages with unsealed borders, but a sealed edge, I cut down the borders with household Fiskars scissors- being careful not to cut my hands on the edges as you move my hand between the two serrated edges I'm creating. For ones with sealed borders, I usually jab a scissors in the side and make a hole and start cutting from there- if there's not much space to get in there without damaging something, a short exacto will work on softer plastics but beware of flying blades on harder plastics (nearly lost an eye once!). Usually, my scissors work fine.
Even easier is the so-called Baym technique for opening CDs. Just pop the hinge of the jewel case off. The case will then be hinged on the sticky tape, and it's trivial to pull off at that point. There's some minor risk of breaking the hinge, but I've only had it happen once, as far as I remember.
Once I used this technique on a White Zombie CD I bought from Best Buy, only to find that the disc inside was an old, horribly scratched Black Sabbath tribute album. I reassembled the case before removing the tape and had an interesting time explaining to the people at Best Buy how I knew it had the wrong CD inside...
Steven N. Severinghaus
As you found the point isn't anti-theft. It is to damage the product. Chances are that if you ruin it that you'll buy a replacement. We found that when selling products to Circuit City that they required us to change our packaging to make it nearly impossible to remove our product without damaging it. We had a good number complaints about that, but management has ignored them so far because we need Circuit City.
You can also get a pair of curved sissors used for cutting R/C car bodys at a hobby shop for around $5. I use them all the time and find them to be quite effective. I remember there was also a Penny-Arcade strip about this "issue", but I can't find it at the moment. Meh..
I thought the OpenX sounded like a great stocking stuffer. I bought 4 last year. I almost cut myself the minute I tried it!
OpenX has two cutterblades, a safe one for pushing and a hidden dangerous one that pops out of the bottom for starting the cutting process with a piercing cut. It's this latter blade I almost cut myself with. Clamshells are just too tough for the blades and it is highly likely that the package will slip when you try to use the starting cutter. I pictured family members trying to use the opener at Christmas with Clamshells on their lap--shudder. I decided not to give the gift of possible genital mutilation and exsaguination for Christmas and tossed all 4 in the trash. By some heavy duty sheers instead.
IMO
its a bucket-wheel excavator
the part that looks like a blade is actually the bucket (well, buckets).
from wikipedia:
"The excavation component itself is a large rotating wheel mounted on an arm or boom. On the outer edge of the wheel is a series of scoops or buckets. As the wheel turns, the buckets remove soil or rock from the target area and carry it around to the backside of the wheel, where it falls onto a conveyor, which carries it up the arm toward the main body of the excavator."
you'd probably be better off putting pressure on the wound and elevating it than applying a tourniquet.
The Penny Arcade strip can be found here
What is mankind really? Well, it's just two words put together Mank, and ind.
AMD used to use clamshell packaging on their Athlon processors. It was a nightmare, and I cut myself more than once opening them. I lavished them with praise (through the reseller channel) a couple of years ago when they switched to a mixed packaging of cardboard, cornstarch-based molding, and a little plastic. That new package is easy to open, easy to reuse, and is easy to disassemble for appropriate recycling.
The Core2 Duo processors I have been receiving are coming in plastic inside cardboard. There's more plastic, but it's not hard to open. I still prefer the AMD packaging, and I hope Intel does something similar soon, as the plastic looks resealable, but isn't.
Vidar
The brains of a chicken, coupled with the claws of two eagles, may well hatch the eggs of our destruction.
Looks like someone failed their polymer chemistry course.
Well, I've taught polymer physics -- the chemistry is not what's interesting here -- so it would be most unfortunate if that were the case.
Whether a plastic is glassy or not does not correlate with whether a plastic is transparent or not.
What makes something cloudy or opaque? You need structure on the scale of the wavelength of light to scatter visible light. Undergraduate physics tells us that something with a high crystallinity, made of lots of microcrystalline domains, is probably going to have such structure, and amorphous (glassy) substances -- which as you've pointed out yourself have far less regular structure -- will probably not. Hence one generally expects polymers with higher crystallinity like polethylene to be opaque or cloudy, as indeed they are, and polymer resins with low crystallinity like PS to be clear, as, by golly, they are.
Here is a little intro on polymers from the American Plastics Council, in which you'll note the following:
"Amorphous polymers are generally transparent. This is an important characteristic for many applications such as food wrap, plastic windows, headlights and contact lenses. Obviously not all polymers are transparent. The polymer chains in objects that are translucent and opaque are in a crystalline arrangement...The higher the degree of crystallinity, the less light can pass through the polymer. Therefore, the degree of translucence or opaqueness of the polymer is directly affected by its crystallinity."
Hmmm... do you suppose those silly folks at the American Plastics Council failed polymer physics, too?
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
i use a small utility knife. cut around the border of the packaging, from the back, just inside the seam. you only need to cut through one layer of plastic, and only about halfway around. then you can just fold down the back and pull out the product.
I have the OpenX, it came in the exact kind of package that it is designed to open which said "this is the last plastic package you wil struggle to open". I don't think it does that great a job anyway, I prefer regular kitchen scissors.
"I forgot my mantra."