The Packaging Blues...

First of all, my apologies to regular readers for last week's unplanned hiatus - and this post attempts to address one of the many causes of it. As many of you know, I recently got married (that's my lovely wife Jessica in the photo) and moved - and both of those things include prodigious amounts of packaging. One of the important things that this experience has taught me is that there is good packaging (efficient, effective, easily unpacked), and bad packaging (the opposite of all those things). Wedding gifts tend to be among the worst offenders in the "bad packaging" category, mostly by being waaay overpackaged - that's Jess swimming in a sea of cardboard, packing paper, and bubble wrap, much of which was used to "protect," wait for it... those two pillows! We saw this trend over and over again - a huge box, containing packing paper and another box (the "gift-wrapped" one), containing yet more packing paper, bubble wrap, tissue paper, and then something tiny and basically indestructible like a lemon zester. The sheer volume of waste is staggering! It's easy to imagine the system that causes this, back at Crate and Barrel: a product is listed as having a certain size, and every product must be packed to [size + X], and if giftwrapped, [size + X + Y]. There just seems to be no provision in the system for how delicate a product is - for example, such a variable would prevent pillows from being redundantly wrapped in bubble wrap. That's the kind of "smart" packing that can save time, money, space, and the environment - and the kind of message that I would like to send a wedding gift recipient.