Packaging is one of those things that most of us may not think about a lot. Being in the hospital for 57 days, one begins to think more about it. The first morning breakfast included orange juice, the same as I have everyday at home. The difference was how the juice was packaged. At home, if the bottle is already open, it involves a simple twist of the cap. In the hospital, the juice comes in a small plastic cup with an aluminum covering with a protruded part of the cover which you pull to open the juice. The seal is very tight. You pull and you pull. Eventually, you succeed and the juice ends up on your clothes or on the bed. On one day, a nurse spotting me struggling to open my orange juice said, “Here, let me help” and she ended up with juice all over her clothing.

Packaging can be plastic, glass, paper, Styrofoam, cardboard, or poly-whatever, and contain and protect things we buy. I think of packaging are ways things are shipped or stored. I am sure packaging experts have a much more sophisticated way of describing this. I suppose we mostly take packaging for granted, but I am beginning to think it is actually a profound topic.

During my hospital time, I watched as nurses opened a sealed package for every pill. I began thinking about packaging as something discrete quite a few years ago. What initially got my attention was a cereal box. I found it very difficult to open without destroying it, and its subsequent ability to keep the cereal fresh. I have since taken it as a personal challenge to be able to open a cereal box with no resulting damage. This is a non-trivial challenge – maybe an art. If it is a science then I haven’t found the instructions anywhere.

The process starts by using a sharp knife with a long blade. You carefully slide the knife under the tab in the center of the top of the cereal box. Then you slice the material to one side while applying a slight upward pressure via the tab. Repeat for the other side. I give being able to do this without damaging the box about a 75% chance at best. You are now almost a third of the way through the task at hand. Now that you have freed up one of the flaps you have to free the other flap by tearing it from the side flaps. Completing this without damage is also about 75% odds if you are quite careful. You are now two thirds of the way to the cereal. Last comes opening the bag inside the box which actually contains the cereal. This is often the hardest part. If you grasp the two sides of the bag and pull very carefully, you have about a 50% chance of opening the bag without tearing it. After opening the main part of the bag, you need to open the corners of the bag so the cereal can flow smoothly into your cereal bowl. Putting the collective probabilities together gives you less than a 50-50 chance at best of having an open cereal box which pours the contents smoothly and can be closed to protect freshness. 

I could go on about jars which require a set of tools to open, pill bottles which can only be opened by children, and fresh fruit containers which have to be squeezed until they break. Then there are bottles and jars which are hermetically sealed at the top. The list goes on. I suspect those who suffer from arthritis of the fingers would have many other examples. I suppose you could expect an 80-year-old person to have these problems, but I have struggled with it for decades, even before I had arthritis in my wrists, and fingers. 

One Christmas, I received a special tool called an “Open It”, used to open things which come packaged in blisters, clamshells, boxes, DVD cases, and numerous other things which are un-openable, packaged with the vendor in mind, and with no thought about how the consumer might open the package without injuring oneself. The Open It is made from hardened and plated precision alloy steel, has honed, angled, and offset jaws, and an ergo-comfortable handle. It has a built-in retractable utility knife and an interchangeable Phillips & slotted screwdriver. It is quite an impressive tool. If you have ever suffered “wrap rage”, suffer no more. It really works. The only catch is the Open It comes in one of those packages that you need an Open It to open it! There is another great tool I found just recently. It is called the Uinxan Jar Opener. It is great at helping you to open the un-openables. Have not had a bottle or jar yet it won’t make it easy to open.

There is another packaging issue becoming part of our lives. Bursting and folding packing material for recycling. The issue initially struck me 25 years ago when I had received my very first order from a startup called NetGrocer. The early online grocer was started in the late 1990s and subsequently folded. NetGrocer and I were ahead of our time. I had ordered an assortment of salsa, condiments, and potato chips. An Australian newspaper wrote a front page business section story in 1998 about how an Internet “visionary” had ordered potato chips on the Internet. Yes, it was me. The amazing part was not the potato chips arriving unbroken, but rather the packaging.

I felt like I wanted to signal the future importance of “packaging” in the way Walter Brooke, as Mr. McGuire, signaled the importance of “plastics” to Dustin Hoffman in his legendary role as Benjamin Braddock in the classic film The Graduate. I opened the two large cardboard boxes and unpacked all the items. Everything was exactly as ordered. I was quite pleased and proud of my online prowess (e-business and e-commerce hadn’t been invented yet) in walking the talk and acquiring all of my favorite goodies, especially potato chips, online.

I was reveling in my predictions about how everybody would buy everything on the Web. Then I got a lump in my stomach. I looked at these two large cardboard boxes on my kitchen floor and the piles of poly-whatever “worms” (many people called them “peanuts”) all over the place. Some stuck to my hands, arms, and clothing. My wife would be home soon and have a lot of questions about my plans to clean up the mess I had created in the kitchen. No problem. I’ll just clean it up. All I have to do is separate all the various packaging materials into their respective categories, burst the cardboard boxes, put the “worms” into a bag so they don’t end up decorating our lawn, and then stow everything away ready for the recycling center. Shouldn’t take me more than a half hour. Let’s see — how much time did I save with my NetGrocer purchase anyway? Surely, I am still way ahead?

Shopping on the Web is part of our lives now. It was was a minority point of view back in the nineties. Retail e-commerce for the fourth quarter of 1999 was $5.5 billion. For the third quarter of 2025, it was $310 billion. In spite of the packaging, you can shop for virtually anything whenever you want and get quick delivery.

In 1999, I believed at some point web sites would enable us to establish fulfillment models where we can place an order for something and have it show up outside the garage door on a scheduled basis. Paper towels, a case of oil, printer paper, stockings, and of course potato chips. I envisioned it happening and Amazon has made it a standard feature.