Momentous, Indeed

It’s Martin Luther King, Jr. Day and, appropriately enough, we are on the eve of a historic Inaugural celebration. There are so many topics these events bring to mind – the Civil Rights movement, the paths of Politics, the fact that Inaugural planners have only allocated 5,000 “Porta-Potties” for a crowd of 2-5 million, even the process by which certain days are declared to be holidays. Considering all of that, I chose today to write about badly-designed packaging.

If you eat food, you’ve probably been to a grocery store lately. You may have noticed the packages with the built-in zip-lock closures. Hot dogs, sliced cheeses, frozen foods, a lot of bulk foods that are expected to last beyond a couple of servings – they all seem to have the handy little feature on their brightly-colored plastic wrappings.

For the most part, these closures work just as they’re supposed to, keeping the food fresher than just clipping the ends of the package together, without the added expense of decanting the food into a separate bag.

However…

We make a run to the warehouse store every so often to stock up on staples. Great big jars of peanut butter, huge boxes of cereal, slabs of meat for the freezer…stuff like that. We went just before the holidays to get all of the baking ammunition Mrs. Cat was going to need and picked up, among other things, a big ol’ bag of brown sugar.

This bag of brown sugar has one of the handy-dandy zip-lock closures on it, and I’m pretty sure no one at the factory has ever used their own product. Because if they had, they would have realized that once the zippy thing has been opened, it can never be closed again. Here’s why: the closure, rather than being at the top of the bag like you’d expect, is one-third of the way down the front of the bag. What happens is that when you grab the bag at the top – as is natural when carrying larger bags – the weight of the sugar is enough to pull the zippy thing apart. Plus, whenever you try to scoop sugar out, the stiff plastic of the zippy thing keeps drawing the bag closed again, so it scrapes across your sugar transport mechanism (spoon, cup, etc.), and the concave part of the zippy thing fills with sugar crystals, which means it can’t grip the convex part securely anymore.

I don’t want to repackage all of the sugar because it would take many large zip-lock bags, which would annoy me, so I just bitch every time Mrs. Cat needs to bake something, because I know I’ll be battling the zippy thing again (it’s on an upper shelf she can’t reach).

It’s the absolutely stupidest bag design I’ve ever seen, and I’ve complained about it enough that Mrs. Cat actually threatened me with a meat thermometer if I didn’t stop. This is the last time I’ll say anything about it, Dear. You can put that back in the gadgets drawer.