Wrap Rage - Frustration and Injuries

Frustration and Injuries

In 2006, Consumer Reports magazine recognized the wrap rage phenomenon when it created the Oyster Awards for the products with the hardest-to-open packaging. A story in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette about wrap rage was featured on The Colbert Report when host Stephen Colbert tried to use a knife to remove a new calculator from its plastic packaging, to no avail.

A survey in Yours, a magazine aimed at people over 50, found that 99% of the 2,000 respondents said packaging had become harder to open over the last 10 years, 97% said there was "too much excess packaging", and 60% said they had bought a product designed with more easily-opened packaging. In a survey conducted at the Cox School of Business, almost 80 percent of households "expressed anger, frustration or outright rage" with plastic packaging. Consumers also tend to use words such as "hate" and "difficult" when describing these products.

Consumers sometimes use potentially unsafe tools such as razor blades, boxcutters, snips and ice picks in their attempts to open packages. In the Yours survey, 71% of respondents said they had been injured while trying to open food packaging. The most common injury respondents had from trying to open packaging was "a cut finger, followed by cut hand, sprained wrist, bruised hand and strained shoulder muscle." According to a British study, over 60,000 people receive hospital treatment each year due to injuries from opening food packaging. The Consumer Product Safety Commission estimated that attempts to open packaging caused about 6,500 emergency room visits in the U.S. in 2004. A 2009 study conducted by the Institute for Good Medicine found that 17 percent of adults over the age of 21 were either injured at least once or know of someone who was injured while opening a holiday or birthday gift.