Fort Knox Packaging

I recently replaced the battery in our bathroom scales. Not that the sleazy, lying device deserved any courtesy, but perhaps the dying coin battery lay at the root of the outrageous untruths the scales told every morning. Unfortunately, not the case. Must be some other malfunction.

That said, it took a razor knife, considerable ingenuity, and one or two bad words to free the new battery from its packaging. And about five minutes of lost time. Granted, at five bucks for a four-pack, I understand why the retailer insists on maximum security. You wouldn’t want every sleazy grifter to slip a couple of these off the rack and into their pocket, now, would you?

At the risk of sounding like the old buzzard I am, I’ll admit to another day in another era, a primitive and unenlightened time to be sure, when one could go to the hardware store to buy eleven bolts with their corresponding nuts and washers, and have eleven of each counted out (on the “counter”, of all places) and handed to you in a brown paper bag, which afterwards was carefully folded and added to your existing store of reusable brown paper bags.

That was back in the day of such ancient notions as full-service gas stations, reusable milk bottles, paper drink cups and ketchup in refilled bottles on restaurant tables. A distant epoch of saber-tooth tigers and dinosaurs. Good riddance.

We’ve moved on from those primitive times, thankfully, and now everything you buy is wrapped, and the wrappers are wrapped and the wrapped wrappers are shrink-wrapped yet again.

Take a camping axe, for instance, all safely secured in styrofoam to protect it from the shock and rigors of the outdoors, the entirety of which package is lovingly presented in the most rugged, manly, matte black piece of fiberboard you can imagine, set off with bold and rugged red lettering, a manly man’s axe container, something that can only be described as “art”.

There is no function to it, just presentation. It’s what we deserve in a world where reality and fantasy have bled one into the other. If Conan could have one, I deserve one, too.

Packaging enables the vendor to provide you with “an experience”, the sense that you’re not just buying a camping axe, you’re acquiring a super-rugged, ergonomic, back-to-nature-yet-state-of-the-art, precision instrument lovingly crafted from the same steel that goes into a Rolls Royce. This should be something not soon forgotten, a moment to which the mind and the heart will return often.

I suppose if you’re “investing” in a new iPhone, you do deserve to be pampered just a little. For the same price you could instead buy several carats of diamonds, so maybe it’s not asking too much to have the device nestled in rich Cerulean velvet, the accessories tastefully packaged in matching drawstring bags with the Apple icon embossed thereon in what must surely be real gold.

But coin batteries securitized in military-grade Kevlar? It took me nine times as long to liberate the darn things as it did to install them! You could rob a bank, get a haircut, and be out of town in the same time.

And, I suppose, there is the small issue of plastic pollution. But don’t get me started.