Brinkswrap Revisited

There's customer-unfriendly, and then there's customer-hostile. A few days ago I wrote about package design. More specifically, I excoriated the plastic retail hulls that have been proliferating for a few years now. The industry refers to them as clamshells, but I've dubbed them brinkswrap (that's shrinkwrap with the over-the-top protective properties of an armored truck). The post struck a chord with one reader of this blog who took a shine to the new name.

"Brinkswrap has been a longstanding frustration of mine. My daughter got a digital camera for Christmas — and a nice cut on her hand from the brinkswrap she had to break through to get to the camera. My wife got a couple of nice knives from her father. They were packaged together in brinkswrap. As I fought through the brinkswrap to get to them, I noted the irony of how much easier it would be to get through the brinkswrap if I already had the knives I was trying to get to."

Touché. Dante forgot to create a special circle of hell for these manufacturers and designers. Nevertheless, maybe we can squeeze them in somewhere. I'd put them between the apparel makers who sew scratchy brand labels onto the inside collars of their shirts, and the inconsiderate rotter who designed those maddening multiple seals on CD jewel cases.

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

UPDATE: Turns out that the Wall Street Journal has a piece about brinkswrap today (although they don't call it that. Maybe next year). The headline is darkly amusing: "The Puncture Wound I Got For Christmas." One buyer of a PalmOne PDA found her pricey new device sealed in one of the clamshell torture devices. She was unable to rip the packaging open, so

"...she hacked off the top with scissors and struggled to pry the two sides apart — also impossible. Finally, she cut a circle around the entire perimeter, only to slice her middle finger on a jagged plastic edge. Elapsed time: 10 minutes."

The article details how some manufacturers are beginning to pay attention to this insanity (probably in part because they fear the inevitable lawsuits, though the paper doesn't explore that angle). Hewlett-Packard is using thinner, easier-to-cut plastic packaging for its inkjet cartridges. PalmOne introduced 'cut here' marks on the clamshell, though that still seems inadequate to me. But these companies are in the minority. Despite pissing off customers everywhere, and sending some to the emergency rooms to get stitches,

"...tough-to-open plastic packaging is soaring in popularity among manufacturers and retailers. One of the chief reasons is that the unwieldy packages make it harder to steal ever-smaller electronic gadgets."

Noted, and I feel their pain, but that's no reason to throw all known rules about brand-building out the window and start alienating customers like no tomorrow. Instead of trying to earn people's loyalty every step of the way, why would a manufacturer treat all of them as if they were thieving scum? The mindset is a nasty cocktail of two parts laziness and one part sheer stupidity. Add a dash of we-don't-give-a-shit, and stir.