I have a problem with product packaging in general. Way too many packages require me to break out the damn toolbox to open, just plain don’t work as intended, or cause me to risk personal injury to open them. Some day I’ll have a new category of this web site with photos and video demonstrating bad packaging.
I’d like to single out a package that annoyed me tonight: two liter bottles. They don’t stand upright for shit and once they’ve fallen over, they never stop rolling. There’s a very obvious solution to this problem that I first realized more than a decade ago when I had my first job in high school bagging groceries:
Make the stupid two liter bottles square, you packaging morons!
I’m calling people names because I find the current bottles so colossally stupid. If there is any kind of bottle that is exactly the kind of bottle that would be the worst possible bottle, the current one is it.
When I say square, I mean square the sides, kind of like a milk jug. A flat-bottomed two liter bottle doesn’t fall over the second you move your shopping cart. A flat-sided bottle doesn’t roll around in the trunk of your car. It more efficiently uses space in the refrigerator. It makes those bottles stackable, and they don’t roll in your refrigerator when you set them on their side because a shelf isn’t tall enough.
C’mon! If I realized this as a teenager, surely to God some a-hole at a giant soft drink company picked up on it decades ago.
Do it!
My .Mac Web Gallery
Loading ...
July 27th, 2006 at 10:36 pm
The issue is not about the bottle so much as the contents, and science. A square bottle would be significantly more likely to rupture, whereas a round-section container presents an even surface to withold the internal pressure of expanding gasses. A squared off container would present weaker areas for the expanding gasses to break. A rolling bottle is better for the consumer than an exploded one…. because once you catch it and pick it up you still get to drink it. Or would prefer to be doused in high fructose corn syrup every time a bottle tipped over?
Milk, and juices, etc can be placed in angular containers because they have almost no propensity to expand as much as a carbonated beverage.
Back when plastic bottles were invented they added plastic flat caps on the bottom, but once they were able to cast the bottles with those nubby flat things on the bottom the need (and cost) went away.
They COULD engineer a thicker, angular plastic container for carbonated beverages, but it would involve tremendous extra costs, and huge amounts of waste, in both manufacture, transport, and the waste stream.
Might as well go back to glass, which I would actually prefer. There is a lot more sand on the planet than oil, and the former is more recyclable.
–chuck
July 27th, 2006 at 10:43 pm
Oh by the way, I minored in Package Design in college, and I’m not a moron.
The last package I was professionally involved in designing was the original Microsoft Mouse (circa 1987, code named “Dove Bar”)… before that I did a lot of food packaging, some board games, a few wine labels, and a sausage package.
By ‘88 I had begun my career move into IT, and by ‘91 I was fully in IT.
Some Chuck Goolsbee Trivia there for you.
–chuck
July 27th, 2006 at 11:12 pm
Then make the bottles hexagonal or octagonal. Add little lumps or fins at certain places on a round bottle to prevent it from rolling. Make the bottle squatter and wider with the same volume instead of having a tall container with the mass high above the unstable base. Make a bottle that’s wider on the bottom than the top so it’s much less likely to tip. Just off the top of my head I’ve thought of four or five things they could do to improve these bottles. I find it hard to believe that professionals haven’t come up with their own (likely better) ideas and that none of them are appropriate. I question whether the people who design these things actually use them, and whether they realize what a pain their bottles are to the user.
And those nubbly things are exactly what makes an upright bottle so unstable, no matter where you set it. I would gladly pay the few extra pennies per bottle to have the flat-ended thing back.
Not everything is about you.
July 28th, 2006 at 8:31 am
I agree with Aaron. The bottoms of the 2-liters are horrible.
Something else… as a parent of a 3-yr old and 4-month old I’ve noticed something… Fisher-Price packaging sucks! Even the simplist toy is held in by no less than 10 industrial twist ties. It takes an average of 10minutes to open a toy. Try doing this with a child on his/her birthday when they want the toy NOW.
July 28th, 2006 at 3:08 pm
Then make the bottles hexagonal or octagonal. Add little lumps or fins at certain places on a round bottle to prevent it from rolling. Make the bottle squatter and wider with the same volume instead of having a tall container with the mass high above the unstable base. Make a bottle that’s wider on the bottom than the top so it’s much less likely to tip.
Every one of those ideas would either compromise the safety of the contents, or add significantly to either manufacturing or transportation costs.
You say that you would pay extra, but if Pepsi was $1.29 for a non-tip octagonal bottle and Coke was .99¢ for a round, tippy, same as before bottle, I bet you’d buy the Coke… and so would the majority of consumers.
July 29th, 2006 at 11:06 am
Your point assumes that the contents of the bottle are unimportant. If that were true, the store brands like Sam’s Choice at WalMart and Big K at Kroger would outsell Coke and Pepsi both, but anecdotally, that doesn’t seem to be the case. People are purchasing the beverage inside, not just the bottle.
I prefer Diet Pepsi. When Diet Coke goes on sale, I don’t buy Diet Coke. I find somewhere that is selling Diet Pepsi cheaper. And if nobody is, I buy Diet Pepsi anyway because it’s what I like. I think you’ll find that most people are the same way. Diet Coke and Pepsi are somewhat similar, but some other drinks don’t seem to have close analogs. Does the Coca-Cola company have a drink that tastes almost the same as Mountain Dew? If not, and if that’s the drink you want, price is much less of a factor.
Some part of my point is that I’m not a packaging professional and I’ve already come up with this handful of ideas for improving the bottle. I find it hard to believe that people who really design packages for a living, with their knowledge, experience, creativity, and budget, can’t come up with ideas equally as good or better. I believe they can, but they (or the companies they work for) care so little about their lousy packaging that they haven’t.