So Annoying: Even More Irritating Packaging
Packaging that can easily drive you up the wall; we’ve written about it before, but it remains astonishing how user-unfriendly many products are. That is, before you’ve actually reached ‘the core’: the contents you intend to eat, drink, or use. Why?
Because besides the aforementioned examples such as the curse of vacuum-packed cheese slices, difficult-to-open milk cartons, impossible jars and bottles, and leaking bags of flour, there are many more types of packaging that consumers find a real nightmare to open, or that otherwise cause irritation.
Brute force
The blister pack: packaging that is often enormous in relation to the product, made of rock-hard plastic, and impossible to open with your bare hands (or with your hands at all, for that matter). Some people can still understand the dimensions, because if something very small is inside, it might otherwise be all too easy to slip into a trouser pocket in a shop. But why make it so stiff and hard that you have a considerable chance of cutting yourself while tearing it open, and that it won’t work without scissors anyway? Most frustrating of all: the scissors you bought because you lost your scissors. Packaged in, yes: a blister pack. AAHHHH!
Such a waste of leftovers
Packaging that you can’t actually empty completely; such a waste! Leftover custard, hair dye, body lotion, food that remains behind because there are strange ridges in the plastic packaging: all irritating.
Tight in its little outfit
Also annoying: very tightly wrapped fresh produce, such as the plastic around cucumbers. And of course those previously mentioned plastic films around snack cheeses from the supermarket. Which is why our tip is: go to the cheesemonger for your surprising cheese board.
Consumer misery
Consumer affairs programme Radar conducted a survey into what people considered the biggest packaging annoyance, and 91 percent of respondents found it irritating when packaging cannot be separated for disposal. This may be because, for example, different materials are glued together: paper with plastic attached to it, for instance.
Also not exactly great: all sorts of separate components individually packaged inside one package. If there are three packs of chewing gum in one airtight package, why do they all have to be wrapped separately in plastic as well?
So there you have it: as long as manufacturers and supermarkets fail to take major steps towards packaging many products in a more user-friendly and sustainable way, consumers will (understandably) keep asking for it.
Header image: Albert Heijn
Read also:
- Beware: Albert Heijn warns about vegetable juice
- 7 food packages that urgently need to be improved
- You can now buy apple pie custard at Jumbo, so I put it to the test
