4

Clamshells

Wikipedia

Apparently, around 6,000 people a year have to go to the hospital thanks to injuries sustained trying to manage clamshell packaging. PVC clamshells are most often used to hide electronics from the sticky fingers of shoplifters and the elderly who have used up all the rights they once had to new things. I don't know how people injure themselves on them -- I read they get cut somehow, so I assume again these are the elderly who put their tissue-paper-over-gushing-blood digits into their newfangled pet trimmer package after using a screwdriver to open a tiny hole, and the resulting mayhem almost bleeds them dry. Regardless of one's ability to slice and dice themselves, clamshells in general are bullshit. In the annals of needless packaging, clamshells will go down in history as the plasticized incarnation of a person you don't know slipping a finger into your ass on a bus and then looking you in the eye. It's needless and an affront to your sense of goodness and justice.

Wikipedia
Emails sent to that address are just long strings of profanity.

3

Cheese

© woodygraphs/iStock

I like a nice brick of cheese. I like brick forms of food. Bricked food is powerful and manly as fuck. I bet bear meat comes in bricks. A brick you can just bite into and then wince about five minutes later as you feel your pulse quickening while your whole body tries to work that godforsaken cheese on through.

I think one brand of cheese on Earth has clued into the fact that no one eats a pound and a half of cheese in one sitting and we may, in fact, want to reseal our cheese for later.

matsou/iStock
And its packaging is, if possible, even weirder.

Everyone else just wraps that brick all loosey-goosey in plastic. So you cut open the cheese, you slice off enough for your delicious, grilled sandwich, and then you have a section of cheese the size of your forearm that you now need to wrap up like a fatty dairy baby in a babushka. Who the hell has cheese babushkas on hand? I might have a freezer bag if I'm lucky, but you're being real presumptuous, cheese. Why should I have to plan ahead to store my cheese when all you needed to do was add a Ziploc seal down one side of the damn brick? I'm not even an engineer and I thought of that shit; don't tell me the dairy farmers of the world can't figure this one out.

Juanmonino/iStock
I refuse to be limited to eating cheese in string form for the rest of my life.

2

Plasticized Foil Tear-Open Packs

Joe Potato Photo/iStock

I'm not sure why plastic foil was invented, other than to look futuristic to people from the 1950s. It's shiny and thin and seems great for bagging potato chips, which is the one truly solid purpose I feel this product has. Could chips be packaged just in plastic bags? I bet they could. I have no idea why they're not. We choose this foil plastic instead. And as far as that goes, it's OK, because chip manufacturers put that seam in there so if you grab the bag just so, you pull it apart and the bag pops open like a shiny gift from the salt gods. Praise Jesus!

Kaleidoscope_/iStock
Making whatever Pinterest crap this is completely unnecessary.

Now look at 95 percent of everything else packaged in that godforsaken plastic foil. Like the tiny spice packets they include in ramen noodles. The tiny spice packets that, if the noodle company is too cheap to include a pre-made cut to start tearing it open or if something happened on the assembly line and your little pre-cut didn't get stamped into the packet, are now harder to get into than a pair of golden panties on a nun in Fort Knox.

Have you ever seen a grown man fight with a spice packet? Seriously wrestle and struggle with this quarter ounce of MSG and pepper flakes and lose his cool because the spice packet is winning? I've done it dozens of times. And it pushes you to the point where you decide to be the smart guy and bite the packet open, so you take a salty corner off and nothing happens. Nothing happens! You still can't tear the damn thing open. It just stretches and writhes in your impotent grasp until you finally lace into it with a cutting tool, but you've already wasted 10 minutes of not just your day but your soul's very existence on this plane, struggling to loose the vaguely chicken-like flavor of elevated blood pressure and the ennui of dinner for one.

CoffmanCMU/iStock
Totally worth it.

1

Red Sticker Ties

janka3147/iStock

A sealed bag is your friend in the kitchen because that seal is holding in freshness. When that seal is broken, your fresh food hurls like a comet toward shitty staleness and butt flavor. So I get it. You get it. We all get it. And if we all get it, someone tell me who the fuck invented these little red sticky ties, like an asinine ribbon of tape stuck to itself around the top of a bag, usually containing some kind of bread product, that can never be undone by any alchemical process known to man?

The only way to circumvent these preposterous sticky ties is to jam a knife behind one and slice it in twain, much the same way you'd dispatch rebels who found their way from the jungle into your secure compound. We mean business, fuckers.

Sasha Radosavljevic/iStock
I leave crumbs behind as a warning to the other loaves.

Slicing it open is fine and all, but now you've got not only a busted tie but a hole in your bag. A hole through which freshness will bubble forth like precious oxygen being lost into space because someone left the screen door open.

In 1961 a guy named Charles Burford started using twist ties to close up bags of bread to help keep them fresh. The twist tie, a simple metal wire with a paper coating, is easy to tie and untie and is about as versatile as all get-out. It was invented in 1961! Put it on your bags! This shitty sticky plastic tie is usable one time and then ruins the bag. It's just volatile and horrible and infuriating in every way. And also less environmentally friendly than a twist tie. Metal and paper can biodegrade. That shit heel red plastic sticky tie? That's going to be sitting in the ground forever making everyone angry.

Flander/iStock
Twist ties, on the other hand, make me just as excited as this bread.

Is it shameful that I am so often bested by packaging? That I am so frustrated that I was motivated to write an entire article on the subject? No. This is a public service. This is for your benefit as much as mine. Don't you bend over and let the packaging industry penetrate you with plastic bumblefuckery. Demand better for yourself and for all of us. Demand paper that can be easily torn or shit that has a little strip you can tear. Or those plastic boxes they pack croissants in with the little nubby buttons you can push to lock and unlock. That shit's clever.

Learn more about packaging in 5 Reasons Packages Get Destroyed (Learned Working At UPS) and If Product Packaging Had To Tell The Terrifying Truth.

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