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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."
I've sure wondered about this. The only reasonable way I've found of opening "modern" plastic packaging is with a pair of aviation snips (i.e. compound-leverage sheet-metal cutters). They work great, but what do people do who don't have them sitting right there in the top compartment of the toolbox in a corner of their living room? And why haven't there been any personal-injury lawsuits yet from all the people who've tried using a box-cutter or other sharp knife, which always gouges out sideways in a wickedly unpredictable and unsafe way?
I just had this happen... I find the plastic wrap not only dangerous to me to remove, but it can be difficult to get the product out of the packaging sometime without damaging it.
I just bought a mini-jack to RCA cable by Dynex. I cut carefully around the edge and when separating the clamshell halves nearly cut myself on the hard sharp plastic... what the heck? Not an unusual occurance with today's annoying packaging but I've gotten pretty good at it. The problem with this package?
Turns out, there was an inner-shell piece "cleverly" designed to hold the ends of the cable in display in middle of the package, a third piece of plastic I couldn't see, and didn't anticipate. In extracting the cable (finally!) the edge of one of the plastics nicked the exterior of the cable... no harm, no foul I guess, but a tug a little harder or in a slightly different direction and the cable could have been compromised.
Also had a remote control I bought for my Dad a couple of months ago. I easily navigated the surrounding plastic and strategically popped out the remote only to find what had appeared to be a cardboard insert was instead the user's manual now cut in half replete with pages of remote codes (for universal remote). So, I had to tape the manual back together to look up the codes.
Throw into the rage mix CD packaging, infuriating! I've had CD jewel cases damaged in the process of freeing my music. And how annoying that "pull" tape holding the jewel case shut! It's almost impossible to remove cleanly and even if you get it off there's almost always some annoying residue.
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...
Did it look anything like this?
editors: you should have waited 25 days, and accepted the story at about... oh 11:00 am on december 25th
then you would have gotten a buttload of seriously frustrated, angry, and demented comments in the affirmative
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Most importantly, how do the manufacturers imagine people are supposed to open those things? I would really like to know the answer to this. (Even better, I'd like somebody like Michael Moore to entrap an executive into a candid, on-camera attempt to open one of his own company's packages using only the everyday household appliances to hand.)
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).
My wife nearly killed herself, literally, trying to open one of these plastic fortresses. It was an individually wrapped steak knife. She cut the plastic around the knife and began to pull the knife out by the handle (which was outside of the plastic), but it got stuck on the way out, jumped, and proceeded to slash her wrist about 5 inches long, from the middle of her palm to just past the wrist-bone. Took her to the ER where she proceeded to get 16 stitches and a "you were lucky" speech from the doctor. 1 milimeter one way or the other and she would have severed either a main artery or damaging nerves and tendons, potentially losing the usage of her hand. Doctor said, "you're lucky blood wasn't squirting all over your ceiling." I can't even imagine what would have happened if I were not there to tourniquet her arm and get her to the ER. All of this 2 weeks before our wedding. Yeah, now the story is funny to tell, but at the time it was scary as fuck. Plus, do you know what it's like explaining to your family why your finance has a slashed open wrist 2 weeks before your wedding? Hah! This packaging is ridiculous and needs to go.
My brother-in-law is a plastic surgeon specializing in hands. He told me last year that fully a *third* of his surgeries are to repair damage caused by these plastic packages. Most commonly, people get frustrated and apply extra force with a knife, which then slips and cuts across the palm of the hand, slicing through some of the tendons and nerves that control the fingers. It is a real mess to repair apparently. Or people cut themselves up on the sharp plastic edges by trying to rip open the package with their hands and brute force.
Bad for us non-surgeons, but good for them - he has a really nice boat!
don't come packaged like that
There's a double-edged sword that the manufacturers LOVE about this packaging.
1. Nearly impossibly for the product to shrink (ie, someone walks up, takes the item from the packaging, leave the package, takes the item.
2. People feel guilty taking something back to the store that looks destroyed. I've actually gotten dirty looks from sales associates when I took a bluetooth headset back that didn't work right. The packaging was mangled because at the time the only thing I had handy to open it were my keys. So I poked holes in it until I could get my fingers into it, ripped it open, charged it....didn't work. Took a manager to get them to take it back.
So yeah. The stores won't put an open item that looks like *that* back on the shelf, so fewer returns. Win-win in their eyes. They don't really care about convenience on this one. In fact, the more inconvenient, the better.
Karma: Chameleon (mostly due to the fact that you come and go).
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?