I find it hard to understand how people can be so hopelessly clumsy and incompetent with tools. It makes me wonder for the future of humanity and how these people manage to wipe their butts. Then, of course, I’ll find a thread discussing this very issue and find out that half the people do not know how to wipe their own butts. America: “we conquered the West and beat Hitler but now we can’t open this darned clamshell”.
I think I am beginning to understand why the Chinese are taking over. We need them to show us how to open packages and wipe our butts.
I’ve seen Garmin handlheld GPS units sold in clamshells that just wrap the complete normal box. When you buy it online, you just get the box, not the clamshell. Crazy waste.
And as I posted in a recent thread about this, clamshell packaging doesn’t stop the shoplifters anyway. On more than one occasion in my former retail experience they would steal scissors and use said scissors to open other stolen merchandise, if they forgot to bring their own or something. :rolleyes:
The way I’d go around it would be to have anti-tampering RFID devices on the products.
You know those stickers that have a metal coil inside? those have a circuit that is powered up when you walk out the door without having deactivated them. One way of deactivating them is to simply cut the coil traces.
Reversing that you could have a package crisscrossed with conductive threads, as long as this are intact the RFID chip on the package does nothing, but if the circuit is interrupted, i.e. someone tries to open the package in the store, it sends out an alarm.
A light cardboard box with embedded threads and RFID chip would be enough.
I use scissors. To get enough cutting power, I cut near the scissor joint and only cut a little at a time.
I would advise against using box cutters as while they have great cutting power, they are harder to control. The plastic material tends to make the box cutter stick, and then suddenly unstick, making the box cutter fly towards you or random body parts. And if not that, then it’s easy to accidently cut into the product itself or instructional material.
The thing is, I’m usually the one who gets handed stuff and told to figure it out, because I’m generally the best at it. I am legendary in my family because I used to do things like take machines apart and re-assemble them…when I was a pre-schooler. I suspect that I get particularly frustrated with this packaging because I am accustomed to picking something up, figuring it out, and easily doing it.
Today I opened a clamshell package quickly and easily, with a pair of utility scissors. The reason I was able to do this was because the plastic was not made of adamantine, but was a somewhat firm plastic that still easily yielded to the blades of the scissors.
I do, in fact, cut around three edges of a package in the normal course of opening it, but sometimes the clamshell is molded so tightly to the merchandise that it’s damn near impossible to do this, without damaging or threatening to damage the merchandise.
I’m totally with you on this, to a point. Nobody deserves five million bucks because they nicked their pinky finger.
But… the manufacturers shouldn’t get a free pass. If they were manufacturing these for a targeted group workers to open, then it might be a different story (for example, if they were packaging an industrial tool kind of thing). But these are targeted at everyone, including children, old folks, people with all kinds of physical and mental limitations, etc. Once you sell a product to the entire world, every “one-in-a-million” event happens several times a day and there should be a higher standard of responsibility on the part of the manufacturer (IMO).
