It Could Be Worse: You Really Can’t Open These 6 Packages
All the cookies loose in your bag, all the mints scattered across the floor and all the popcorn in your cleavage: packaging isn’t always very user-friendly, to put it mildly. Like the packaging for cold cuts: even the vault of the Dutch Central Bank is easier to get into. Our Adeline (nickname: Eddie) wrote about her problems with awkward packaging, and what you’d never expect: readers had even worse stories. Read on and shudder…
Adeline officially declared war on the rustic paper packaging of Leksands Knäcke. Those are the triangular crackers from Sweden, in beautiful but SUPER-inconvenient packaging. Impossible to open without setting it on fire, unless you tear the entire package into shreds. And then? Nobody eats an entire pack of those crackers and lives to tell the tale – because you’ll be sitting on the toilet huffing and straining, something to do with fiber – and they don’t fit in a Tupperware container because of their authentic pizza-slice shape. Misery and tough crackers, in short, and Eddie describes it deliciously.
Holy holie
Our readers sympathize with Adeline, but also show that her cracker problems are small potatoes compared with other packaging misery. Renée went big, for example, and bought a kilo of turmeric in a paint can (why, you may wonder, but that’s another story). Minutes of fiddling with a screwdriver, and when the can finally pops open, you’ve got yellow powder everywhere. A Holi festival in your own kitchen is never fun.
Furious
A problem of existential proportions: you buy a new pair of scissors, sealed in one of those indestructible blister packs. How do you open the packaging? Henk: ‘The picture showing you how to open it features a pair of scissors.’ Enough to make you furious.
Bring out the axe
Marion has moved beyond civilization and brings out the heavy artillery: ‘Some packaging, such as the packaging for a toothbrush, can only be opened with an axe. 😱’
Bang, there it goes
Some packaging, on the other hand, opens far too easily, Dennis says: ‘Those packages that immediately spring open or break apart when they hit the floor. Like those containers of custard, or containers of garlic sauce. If they fall, everything is instantly covered in sauce or custard. I hate that!’ No, nobody can really get enthusiastic about that, and I think everyone has had to dab aioli off the extractor hood at some point. A spicy little fragrance too, lovely.
Mrs. Maggi
Margreet mainly struggles to get stock cubes out of their foil. Relatable… ‘I always wonder why Mrs. Maggi never said to her husband: you’re not getting in until you come up with something else.’
Time to demolish
Also enough to drive you completely crazy: those containers of laundry pods or dishwasher tablets. You start out very politely clicking and pulling, but before long it looks as though you’re competing in the World’s Strongest Man, grunting and roaring as you pound the packaging with your fists, face red and veins pulsing on your biceps. Sound familiar, Esther? ‘Childproof, but impossible for me to open too. I always just demolish the lid.’ And then knock a few tree trunks back and forth across the backyard for relaxation.
