Before you start opening all those plastic packages . . .

Rogier van Bakel was discussing the near-impossible level of effort needed to open some of the newer packages a few years back. It's still a topical post, especially right about now:

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.