A question popped into my mind recently when I was stymied by a recalcitrant tub of butter: “What is on the syllabus for Packaging Engineering 101?”
No, that’s not quite true. It wasn’t an idle thought but a mantra I said repeatedly while trying to liberate a bit of butter for my morning toast. A shrink might call it a “coping mechanism,” but I’ve trained myself to do that when frustrated by life’s roadblocks. It’s a way of distracting myself from my original impulse: to throw the butter across the room.
It worked, but I remain haunted by the question. To judge by their handiwork, packaging engineers are trained to devise ever more ingenious ways to keep consumers from getting at a product. Take the whipped butter. It wasn’t just that the tub and cover were ferociously interlocked. Peeping out from between them was another barrier, some sort of seal I’d also have to break through.
That’s the way it must look to an inmate who slips out of his cell only to find searchlights crisscrossing the prison yard between him and freedom. It makes sense that an architect would design redundancy into a penitentiary. But what purpose does it serve in a container of butter? Or the plastic-cemented-to-cardboard that frustrates parents trying to get at a Christmas toy for a crying child?
I can guess at what motivates packaging engineers. Who doesn’t want to be a virtuoso? A baseball player wants to hit the longest home run. An opera singer wants to hit the highest note. I can imagine myself as an aspiring packaging engineer standing in front of the Egyptian mummies at the Field Museum. I’d be saying to myself: “That’s what I want to do with my life. I want to seal something for all eternity.”
But what’s in it for the manufacturers? Why would they pay someone to keep consumers from putting their hands on the product?
I got that lesson as a teenager. My after-school job was at a florist shop that did lots of wedding receptions. Guests liked to take home the floral arrangements. Usually that wasn’t a problem, as we put the flowers in cheap papier-mache containers. But for one bash, the mother of the bride wanted something more elegant. So I was standing at a workbench seeing if I could fit something heavy, say a brick, into the bottom of a handsome pottery bowl. My idea was that the heavier a floral arrangement, the less likely it was to be taken.
The boss asked what I was doing, then said: “You kuni lemel!” (Basically Yiddish for “dimwit.”)
He explained that the contract provided that customers would be charged for any bowls that didn’t come back. He wanted the guests to nab them.
“So why are you making that harder for them?” he said, shaking his head in disbelief. “I’m beginning to think you’re not college material, kid.”
Yet that’s what packaging engineers do: They make it harder and harder for consumers to consume. Don’t they have to study economics? No matter how many design awards a product’s packaging wins, it’s not going to inspire brand loyalty among customers who have to claw, bite and curse their way in.
This fad of playing keep-away with a customer began in big-box stores. It spread to supermarkets. Alongside the prepared-foods counter now are stacks of plastic containers with bend-down lids. I learned the hard way to keep them open. They close with the finality of a bank vault. But beware turning your back on the bagger when paying the cashier. In a wink, he or she will have snapped that cover irredeemably shut over your mashed potatoes.
Not so long ago, the whispered watchword of merchandisers was planned obsolescence. The quicker a product wears out, the quicker a consumer becomes a repeat buyer. But that model doesn’t work anymore.
Now, the customer may quit before the product does. Defeated by Fort Knox-like packaging, he collapses on the couch. The product remains pristine in its transparent cocoon, then winds up on a closet shelf or in the attic. It will be there, still, when we’re gone. It could outlast our civilization, to be excavated by a successor society’s archaeologists.
Poring over such items, they’ll conclude that our society went on a binge of consumption then, realizing the futility of materialism, opted for a simpler life and buried cordless toothbrushes, stereo headphones and wood-burning kits in little shrink-wrapped coffins.
Perhaps they’ll envy us.
