Amen to the following. I wonder if there is a legal liability issue of injuries....

Bot

Tales From Packaging Hell
(Wired.com)

By Steve Friess
02:00 AM May, 22, 2006

The stubborn plastic casing around the Microsoft Xbox 360 faceplate seemed to laugh first at the kitchen scissors and then the steak knife that tried to penetrate it. When 14-year-old Daniel Mroue's attempt to open the thing with a long, serrated bagel knife failed, his parents became concerned.

Mroue's father, George, took over with a pair of box-cutters, which did the trick. But George Mroue also ended up with a wad of bandages shoring up the damage after slicing his palm open on a sharpened piece of plastic.

"It was ridiculous," groused George Mroue of the February incident. "There was nothing anywhere telling us how to open the (darn) thing. I don't understand why they make it so goddamn hard to open these things."

That's an increasingly common question these days. From Psyclone electronics cables encased in impenetrable layers of thick plastic to DigiPower camera batteries coated with packaging several times the size of the item itself, the hardest part of buying electronics these days is opening the products when you get them home. In many cases, it makes solving Halo 2 seem like a kindergarten project.

The bottom line is the bottom line. Retailers demand the hard-to-open packaging to avoid "shrinkage," or shoplifting, a problem that cost U.S. stores more than $10 billion a year or $25 million a day, according to statistics from the National Association for Shoplifting Prevention. They also want the item to be visible to customers and capable of withstanding the rigors of long-distance shipping from manufacturing plants in Asia.

"In a nutshell, it is pretty much all about retail theft," says Mary Ann Falkman, editor-in-chief of Packaging Digest, a trade publication. "Retailers like Wal-Mart, Target, Best Buy and the like who sell these small electronic toys and gadgets demand that they be put in packaging that's next to impossible to steal from. But they could make it easier to open it when you get it home."

The nemesis of electronics buyers everywhere is something known in the business as the clamshell or blister packaging, those packages made of one or two layers of polyvinyl chloride, or PVC, plastic and soldered around the edges.

The issue has become such a problem for customers that Consumer Reports in March issued its first-ever Oyster Awards, a tongue-in-cheek "honor" for the most difficult-to-open packaging genres. Topping that list was the packaging that electronics are most frequently found in, the PVC clamshell.

But it's not just a matter of customer frustration. These packages pose real danger. Data on the topic is irregularly collected and vague; the U.S. Centers for Disease Control's most recent accounting, in 2001, listed "unintentional cut/pierce" as the fifth most common cause of nonfatal unintentional injury, but that also includes the much more common assortments of knife accidents owing to normal kitchen work.

Anecdotally, though, emergency room doctors say they're slammed the week after Christmas with such injuries and see them regularly all year. Dr. Christian Arbelaez, a Boston-area ER physician, sees about a case a week, some as serious as tendon and nerve damage that require orthopedic surgeons to repair.

"I would definitely like to tell (manufacturers) that serious hand injuries are occurring because of this packaging," said Arbelaez, a member of the Trauma Care and Injury Control National Committee of American College of Emergency Physicians. "Especially for people who have jobs that require the use of their hands a lot, this can be detrimental to their careers. There needs to be some kind of change."

One of the more perplexing parts of the issue to Mroue is that the Xbox faceplate that injured him cost about $20, hardly a big-ticket item. Theo Unger of the Seattle area is equally baffled by that; he cut himself on the plastic packaging of a $10 Dynex headphone splitter. Dynex is a subsidiary of Best Buy.

"To be honest, I probably cut myself because I was so pissed off and just started hacking at the thing," said Unger, a 34-year-old real estate agent. "It all seems so idiotic."

But John Zittrauer, spokesman for the Best Buy store in the Chelsea section of New York, says it adds up. With big-ticket items like MP3 players, cell phones and digital cameras kept under lock, it's the small stuff hanging from bars and on shelves that pose the risk.

"If we make weak packaging for a $10 item and we lose 30 of them, then it's a $300 item now," Zittrauer said. "I agree, they are a lot of times a pain to get open. But it's a tough line to walk to make things not easily accessible for theft protection before purchase and easy to open after purchase."

Store chains, in fact, make distinct demands on manufacturers. Hewlett Packard packages its inkjet cartridges differently, for example, for Office Depot than for Costco, and HP does away with the clamshells altogether in favor of cardboard boxes for people who order the cartridges from the HP website, global packaging manager Alison Kent said.

Kent said HP, responding to customer complaints, has tried to make it easier to open the clamshells by putting indents in the plastic and instructing people on where to cut.

Many manufacturers are beginning to tune into the problem. MP3 player maker iriver recently switched to paper boxes for its top-end offerings. Energizer started packaging its batteries with slits in the back of the clamshell to give customers a point of entry. Monster Cable is already a leader in easy-to-open packages -- for years it has encased its cables in plastic containers bolted together with rivets at the corners that are simple to pull apart. The company says its upcoming next generation of packages will be even easier.

And one Richmond, Virginia, packaging company, MeadWestvaco, markets itself on grounds that it has devised packaging from a thinner, recyclable plastic and cardboard that can be easily cut with scissors as a better way to balance the store-display and theft-prevention needs and the ease-of-opening factor.

Others may soon reconsider. An executive with Performance Design Products, which makes electronics accessories under the labels Pelican and Headbanger Audio, acknowledges something needs to be done.

"As a consumer myself of other products, I've always wondered how the heck do I get this open," said Paul Chen, PDP's vice president of content and licensing. "We could probably do a better job to outline the best way to open this product. That is something to consider."

this is all you do.. get scissors.. cut across the top.. then two strips down each side.. and it folds open.. idiots

although opening a package of new scissors was pretty fun

Yeah serious, apparently all these college degrees eveyone keeps getting are ironically making everybody stupid.

This makes no sense, why would someone remove something from the package in order to steal it? Just shove it in your pocket and leave?

Packaging costs a lot of money, you would think they would want to cheapen it up to reduce costs.

__________________
1999 SL500
1969 280SE
2023 Ram 1500
2007 Tiara 3200

Sometimes you buy an X-box when you really needed to buy a nice high quality knife.

__________________
-Marty

1986 300E 220,000 miles+ transmission impossible
(Now waiting under a bridge in order to become one)

Reading your M103 duty cycle:
http://www.peachparts.com/shopforum/831799-post13.html
http://www.peachparts.com/shopforum/831807-post14.html

Any time you buy an X-Box, you really needed to buy some sun screen.

__________________
1980 300D - Veggie Burner !

It takes surgical skill to open some packages.

Surgical or demolition.

B

Because the disc may be less than 6X6 inches while the box is bigger and makes it harder to get into your jacket and easier to spot.

__________________
01 Ford Excursion Powerstroke
99 E300 Turbodiesel
91 Vette with 383 motor
05 Polaris Sportsman 800 EFI
06 Polaris Sportsman 500 EFI
03 SeaDoo GTX SC Red
03 SeaDoo GTX SC Yellow
04 Tailgator 21 ft Toy Hauler
11 Harley Davidson 883 SuperLow

...put the knife in a day pack and use it to get a life instead of an x-box!

__________________
...Tracy

'00 ML320 "Casper"
'92 400E "Stella"

My all time favorite packaging problem was the time I forgot a knife and had to pick one up on my wat out hunting. When I needed it I could not open the damn package. I eventually got it open using a nail that I found but it took no less than a half hour to open the package.

Wow.


I had a large plastic case over the USB hub I bought. I broke a pair of scissors trying to open the case.

__________________
-Justin

91 560 SEC AMG - other dogs dd
01 Honda S2000 - dogs dd
07 MB ML320 CDI - dd
16 Lexus IS250 - wifes dd

it's automatic.

Small expensive items are often placed in big -- 12" by 12" or so plastic cases. I buy SAM-e, a natural anti-depressant with helpful cartilage building properties (anybody here who isn't getting older, just ignore this) at Costco. About $40 for a box about 5"x3"x2", encased in big plastic.

People with difficulty with this need to buy a carpenters utility knife. They usually come with 3 blades which should last a long time if that's all you used it for.

The main thing is to avoid cutting yourself with the knife. Having done that more than once over the years with various things, I've finally gotten a real good sense of where the blade is pointing in relation to the hand that is holding the cutt-ee.

Slice and dice.

__________________
1986 300SDL, 362K
1984 300D, 138K

ive actually used a band saw to open a package once.. it defeated the scissors, and knife, next step was plasma torch

My Digital camera came in packaging like this. Had to use tin snips to get it open, ended up cutting the software in two...

__________________
1989 300E 144K