I'm going to run for president
And I want you to be angry, too
I joke that I'm going to run for president. I’m going to run a very straightforward campaign: I'm not going to end any wars, but I'm also not going to start any new ones. Taxes will neither go up nor down. You will neither gain nor lose freedoms. I'm going to be an entirely non-partisan President in nearly every way—EXCEPT that I'm going to fix consumer goods packaging.
That’s right. Guys, it's simply too hard to open shit we've bought these days, and I don't know why. Well, I do know why. Or at least I'm pretty sure my guess is correct.
Pull tabs that just rip off. Adhesives that are more physically durable than the safety seal they're holding on. Cardboard boxes that peel apart rather than pulling open. Little plastic stickers holding the little cardboard latches on boxes shut. Do none of the executives at these companies use their own products? Does nobody that makes this stuff actually care?
It's pervasive. And we just accept it. I recently found a cereal at Costco that was packaged in a durable cardboard box with a little clasp that ACTUALLY WORKED, and I spent the whole next month having EVERY PERSON WHO CAME IN OUR HOUSE feel, hold, and examine this box. I don't usually care all that much about packaging quality, but I would gladly pay the extra nickel or whatever for packaging that doesn’t annoy me.
Whole Foods: Your “old school vegetable soup” is delicious. But I stopped buying it because it's trapped in that fucking container like it's a national secret. The pull tab? It used to work. The plastic is different now, and it tears in a perfect circle straight around the opening. And somehow it seems like it’s vacuum sealed, so cutting it with a blade means flaps of plastic drag through my soup, creating a mess. Straight to jail.
Every tube of God knows what, that has that little foil bit covering the squeeze-out hole MOCKS US with a pull tab. Just like the vegetable soup, I have to stab it to get stuff out, because it’s not pulling off correctly. Or it’s adhered so tightly that only someone pure of heart can peel it off like a sword from stone. We can put a man on the goddamned moon but I can't buy a fucking sandwich where the single use plastic shell isn't some kind of puzzle box. Right to jail, right away.
Last year, I had to have a surgery on my thumb. I know that accessibility is important, but being unable to pinch things tightly made me learn the hard way how difficult so much shit is for no good reason. How many times it seemed like brands just *didn't care* about the things they make. Not because I’m a weak thumb boy, but because it’s annoying for literally everyone. Why is this the hard part?
How about those foil seals that have the little half circle of plastic across the diameter? When you cleanly pull one of those off it feels like you won the lottery. And for all the other foil seals that leave a thin, dissatisfying ring of foil around the rim of your plastic jar, bide your time because I’m coming for you.
I want to briefly throw out some recognition to some companies in the peanut butter industry, who have been—as best as I can tell—single-handedly carrying all jar-based consumer experience innovation. Someone at some of these companies said, “You know, if we made these even just uneventful to open it would spark so much joy that people would prefer our product.” And they were right. A national holiday for those guys, who just gave a fuck. But banks stay open for it.
I would absolutely be a bad president, but I would be swift and decisive on this issue. 100% of people are tired of this shit. My approval rating would be historically high—on this issue alone. I would mitigate my disastrous foreign and domestic policy through an elaborate propaganda effort, making commercials in which I force the frozen chicken nugget CEOs to try to open a bag of product that the seal stamping machine stamped the edge wrong…without scissors.
Can we talk about how on cardboard boxes from products bought in bulk, they put the pull tab to rip the thing open one side. But why don't they do the other side too? What am I supposed to do with this box? Smoosh it flat? No I'm gonna rip the other side open so I can get it in the recycling bin like I’m supposed to. It would have cost them next to nothing to just run the cardboard through the perforating machine a second time so that you could rip the other side open and make the damn thing flat.
You'd think the box people never used a box a day in their lives.
When you start to talk about this with *literally anybody* they'll get animated. I take more pleasure than I should in getting someone raving about how it's 2025 and blister packs are still not illegal? I get pictures texted to me from my friends who started noticing how bad this is after I made them realize.
Annoyingly, there’s no real fix for this unless someone starts making it illegal. I am a Clorox shower spray loyalist purely because their “sprays every drop” bottles do, indeed, spray every drop. They’ve managed to figure out how to have a spray bottle where you don’t need to turn it sideways or whatever so the little plastic tube is in the remaining ten milliliters of solution while you awkwardly honk out a few wheezy spritzes from the nozzle.
But the rot of cost cutting is setting in: removing the nozzle to refill the spray bottle from the big gallon refill jug you can get at Costco isn’t good, and sometimes the trigger on the nozzle fails to spring back into position. I’m not hopeful that I won’t be be back to the doldrums of Lysol cleanser. Someone will realize they can reduce the unit cost by a few pennies so they can juice their Christmas bonus and we’ll be back to square one.
Anyway, Basta for Prez 2028: A Single-Issue Candidate for America