Alexander Freitas of the Infinity Squared blog notes the difficulties with frustrating tear-strips on packaging, and, comparing an easier-to-open pack from one manufacturer with a difficult tearstrip from another, suggests (somewhat along the lines of ‘Forcing functions designed to increase product consumption‘), that the company’s thought process may be something like:
We will make packaging that a consumer will lose patience trying to open, and so will get a knife, destroy the packaging, and have to eat all those big cookies in one go. We will be rich.
As he also notes, patent issues may be responsible for some of the different variants of tearstrips used (some more effective than others), but I really would be very interested to know whether the ‘McVitie’s technique‘ (below) - whereby the tear-strip is positioned a long way down the packet - is genuinely intended to encourage greater consumption, or just to make it easier to grip the packet while pulling the strip.
Maybe we’re the exception to the rule, but the position of the tear strip makes no difference to our consumption: we always destroy the packaging on packs of biccies because we decant them straight into a biscuit tin, thus clearly making McVitie’s fiendish tearstrip strategies pointless.
For cream crackers, we open the pack and put the opened pack, still with its wrapper, into a specially designated cracker tin. For an extra guarantee of freshness, I usually cover the open end with a freezer bag. Just in case, you understand.
The most annoying thing about opening products is tins of red salmon ditto tuna, naturally). You have to open them with a butterfly can opener, and this can be quite tricky even for me, so I assume older people or anyone with arthritis must find them very frustrating. Not all tins have ring pulls, which are much easier to use.
The thing about packs and tins that are hard to open is that clever strategies (or, in the case of tinned fish, no strategy) can backfire: you just think ‘why can’t they make things easier to use’ and will sometimes decide not to buy at all.