THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, June 24, 1995 TAG: 9506240005
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A11 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Opinion
SOURCE: George Hebert
LENGTH: Medium: 70 lines
The people who design packages are pretty smart. But sometimes they seem to outsmart themselves. And sometimes their smarts aren't called into play.
Air-tight seals for perishables are old stuff to them. When some zanies around the country began tampering in deadly ways with certain products, tamper-proof containers were on the shelves in the blink of an eye. Long before that, the package-constructors devised child-proof caps for medicine bottles, spurred by a tragic danger to curious youngsters. Trouble is, they succeeded too well: Some of the lids have proved resistant to the very people who needed access to the bottles at crucial moments - weakened sick people and the elderly in particular.
Now government orders are going out to modify the child-proofing to deal with this problem of frustrated adults, some of whom have actually created new dangers to children by leaving off the lids once they managed to remove them the first time. Or who have requested non-child-proof packages and put the problem of access by young folks in the home (maybe visitors) right back where it was in the beginning.
We can be pretty sure that the drug-packagers will respond just as adroitly to the new retrenchment command as they did to the child-proofing directives in the first place. We should have those new containers - still locking out the youthful hands but opened easily by the elderly - in jig time.
The inventive talent is available. It just has to be put to work.
Which raises a related question. What, now, about difficult-to-open packages of the nonmedical variety?
Just the other day, my wife and I had a major struggle to open the soft but fiercely sealed wrapper containing a precooked luncheon item. There was no pre-cut notch in the tightly crimped edge, and it took several heavy tugs to create an opening, something that might have defeated many a buyer, even among the unfeeble.
The same sort of thing happens with the bindings on as simple an item as the crackers served with a salad. I find myself using my teeth, often, to make the crucial tear.
And when it comes to hardware items, the kind you find hung in clear, tidy packets on store pegs - wow!
Trying to get to something like a new blade for a piece of lawn equipment, encapsulated in some modern molding of clear plastic, can be a formidable undertaking.
With one shop-work item I bought recently, that clear packaging was so thick, and so devoid of crevices for inserting fingers or tools, that I wound up just chewing randomly through the stuff with a heavy pair of shears, taking something of a chance of damaging the product itself.
And in this instance, as in quite a few others where manufacturers have set out to defeat pilfering and make store-stocking more orderly, though the use of stout, see-through armor - there wasn't a printed recommendation in sight on how to get into the little monster.
That much at least - instructions about cutting along some dotted line or lifting some tab or pressing some designated spot - was once upon a time a common mercantile courtesy to buyers. But the smarties are drifting away, and we're too often left on our clumsy own these days.
True, this is not the sort of aggravation that the Consumer Product Safety Commission can lash into and correct for us.
But the manufacturers and packagers themselves, prodded by simple common sense, could certainly use their expertise - demonstrated so often, so convincingly - to fix things.
And ought to. MEMO: Mr. Hebert is a former editor of The Ledger-Star. by CNB