Hacker News Reader

Comment by tibbon | Hacker News Reader

I've always wondered why companies spend so much money on making packaging that requires a sword to open? I guess it ships better and has less theft of internal parts. From what I've seen products from Japan generally have a clear way to open them (little tear-away tab), but American products are made to need a chainsaw.

View on HN

It's so it looks nice on the shelf - you want every piece to be visible and tastefully displayed but hard to steal. Once it has been bought, dealing with the packaging is your problem.

This serves no purpose for something bought online, hence Amazon as the driving force. Toys R Us would never push for it because they want attractive packages that sell.

The trend has also been to make the toy actually available to operate from inside the packaging.

So there are all these intricate ways of tying certain parts down but letting others stay free, all while a hidden microswitch is held down by another piece of plastic to cripple the toy in a demonstration-only mode with less battery wear. Oh yeah, let's not forget the preinstalled batteries. Wanna bet the Amazon toys have none included?

I thought it was a shoplifting deterrent. SD cards and the like have bulky, hard to open packaging to make it harder to conceal when walking out of a store. Amazon doesn't need such deterrents, so I'm glad their finally using their clout to get easier to open packaging.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com