I was in a dollar store and looking at everything very well and securely wrapped in layer and layer of plastic.
It’s a bit before my time, but I do recall a few things sold before say 1960 and they were wrapped in a box with some sort of transparent sheet (plastic?) window, so you could see the doll but it was mostly cardboard.
First of all, I guess we had a lot less stuff, thus less need for wrapping, and I assume most of it was cardboard.
I read a lot of things from the 40s, so I know plastic was around then, (“don’t give children metal toys save for the soldiers on the front” type of thing).
I am just asking about wrapping of items (toys, household, etc) in general.
I asked my mother and she said, items in places like Woolworth or Ben Franklin were basically displayed and the clerk would get them and toss them in a paper bag (or box) so there was no need for wrapping.
When I say “olden days” I use that term, because I really don’t know or remember when this over plasticization of items started, though I know definitely by the 80s, everything was double wrapped in plastic and hard to open, so feel free to chime in with whatever, but I was more interested in say pre 1950s.
The “blister packs” with a formed plastic “bubble” glued to a cardboard backing was certainly around by the early 1960s, and I suspect by the late 1950s. I remember it as a kid. But that was a lot easier to open than the heat-sealed plastic-to-plastic “clamshell” that everyone curses these days, and which requires scissors or razor blades to slit open.
I recall tat, at my local 5 and 10 (yes, it was called that, and was written on the sign) downtown in my home town a lot of things were sold without any packaging at all. They were arrayed in glass binds, with price stickers on, or the price stamped on it in ink. A lot of other stuff was sold in boxes (including, amazingly, rock candy). Some items were merely affixed to cardboard backing with glue or wire twists. A few things were in plastic bags.
Here are pictures from stores in another town – Southbridge, Massachusetts, in 1954. Note how a lot of toys were sold loose in glass bins, as I recall from my town a decade later. Notice also the toys in boxes, although some boxes had clear plastic over part of the lid.
Plastic may have been around, but there was a lot less of it, and it wasn’t really used a lot for toys until the 1950s. In the 1960s Fisher-Price was still selling a lot of wooden toys (and not for “nostalgic” reasons), and I still got a lot of toys made out of tin, held together by bent tabs. Nowadays these would be off the shelves, because you could cut yourself on sharp edges, but I had many toy tops, cars, guns, and the like made out of formed and bent tinplate.
As others have said: an awful lot of stuff that’s wrapped today wasn’t wrapped then. It was just out on the shelves; a clerk would put your purchases into a paper bag, or sometimes a box, when you bought them. If you were buying something like a lot of nuts and bolts, they’d be out in a bin, and there’d be a stack of paper bags nearby that you could put your selection into. Some hardware stores around here still do it that way; I prefer it. Cheaper and less hassle than the annoying blister packs.
Things that were wrapped were likely to be in cardboard boxes. Sometimes there was a picture on the outside of the box which showed you what was in it; sometimes there was an opening in the box, which might or might not be covered with cellophane or something of the sort.
Things shipped through the mail probably came in a cardboard box. When we mailed things, we often overwrapped the box (which was very likely a used one) with brown paper, usually cut from grocery bags though I think you could buy it on a roll; this could be taped and/or tied with string. Post office handling procedures were different; they don’t want you to do that any more, because modern equipment would be likely to damage such wrapping, or maybe even be damaged or at least clogged up by it. – we also routinely wrapped schoolbooks (which belonged to the school, and were supposed to be returned to be handed to the next class in that grade) in brown paper from grocery bags, both to protect them and because you could then write your name on and/or decorate the wrapping, which you weren’t supposed to do to the book. This wasn’t, at least in my school, an income thing; pretty much everybody did it.
Liquids would be in glass bottles, paper labels. For some items, usually drinks, you could return the bottles and the company would take them back from the store (or from your porch, if you had your milk etc. delivered) and refill them. Pills and such might be in glass bottles or in cardboard boxes. They wouldn’t be individually wrapped. Shampoos and such were still generally in glass bottles, though I remember that Prell came in a plastic tube, at least by the 1960’s.
singing off-key Brown paper packages tied up with string…
In the REAL OLD olden days, stuff was wrapped up in hide and still on the hoof. “Happy Birthday, Og! Your present is that antelope to the far right. Go get it!”
~VOW
Tiny little things were sometimes sold in tiny little boxes.
Before bubble wrap there was newspaper. We wrapped fragile stuff in newspaper. We could use all we want, because everyone had a daily (or at the very least, a Sunday) newspaper delivered, and newspapers had a lot more pages, and even if you ran out, your neighbors would give you their newspapers after they read them because everyone in the neighborhood knew each other.
As for less fragile stuff, when it was small enough, we might try just putting it in a regular envelope and taping it shut. If that didn’t work, we’d use a corrugated cardboard box and use just enough newspaper to keep it from sliding around. Everyone had a big stash of cardboard boxes in all sorts of sizes, and if you didn’t have the right box, you just went to your neighbor because. . . When we couldn’t write any more addresses on the box, we might cover it with brown kraft paper, like you still see at supermarkets. Kids also cut the shopping bags to size to use as book covers.
In my day everyone had pretty much moved to Scotch tape, but I can remember big rolls of “packing tape,” which was basically a strip of kraft paper with glue on one side. In a pinch, you could just cut a shopping bag into strips and glue it into place.
Of course we all knew that wouldn’t hold together in the mail, so we tied it all up with string (regular thin cotton string or twine) and took it down to the Post Office or whatever UPS was called in those days. And they’d look at it, and if it wasn’t right, we took it back home and did it again.
Big stuff was packed in a barrel and cushioned with excelsior.
If you go to a thrift shop nowadays, that’s more like what the packaging situation used to be in regular shops. I.e., individual items displayed on shelves or in bins, perhaps put into a bag at purchase, or often just carried out in one’s own little hands (still remember a childhood stuffed-toy purchase where I was handed the adored new pet right then and there, with no packaging of any kind).
Dammit, I was going to use that clip, but it’s a packing crate, and I didn’t want say, “barrel, then packing crate, etc.” And my “excelsior” link was to the definition.
I wonder about when things were packing in wooden barrels. Did the shippers expect you to return the barrels, or did everyone have a pile of barrels in their store or home? Because it seems a really bulky way of packing stuff.
I don’t know if many places still have this, but here’s a roll dispenser for brown paper, or butcher paper, that would be situated at the end of a long bench. The paper would be rolled out, the items (might be food, clothing, or anything unwieldy really) placed on top, and then the paper was cut, folded, and taped into a package small enough to carry, or to place in a string shopping bag.
Little boxes on the hillside,
Little boxes made of ticky tacky,1
Little boxes on the hillside,
Little boxes all the same.
There’s a green one and a pink one
And a blue one and a yellow one,
And they’re all made out of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same.
And the people in the houses
All went to the university,
Where they were put in boxes
And they came out all the same,
And there’s doctors and lawyers,
And business executives,
And they’re all made out of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same.
1960s comment on suberbia, bit it’s an implicit description of packaging.
