The Genius of Candy Packaging

I don’t think I’ve ever met a person who hates Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.  You would have to hate candy in order to hate that movie, and I don’t see how that’s possible.  You would also have to hate Gene Wilder, which is also not possible.  He may have been in some weird movies sometimes, but I think he really was the Johnny Depp of his time.  Minus the sexiness.  Gene Wilder was just plain not sexy.

Have you ever noticed that the candy packaging is what makes the candy that much more appealing?  Like in the beginning of the movie, Charlie goes to the candy store to buy a chocolate bar.  The candy packaging in that store really is eye candy.  The kids are basically going crazy over everything they are seeing.  The explosions of color and dimensions and textures that all make the back of your throat start to tingle and your fingertips start to itch.  Which one do you choose?

Candy Packaging

The candy packaging conveys what you can expect on the inside.  Lots of bright colors and fun shapes speak of a mysterious concoction that is just as imaginative as it is delicious.  Like the box for Nerds.  The outside is flamboyantly decorated, with some happy-go-lucky, lumpy cartoon versions of the candy having a good time.  When you open the box you have a pretty good idea that you are going to get some small, rounded treats of the same colors.  And then you do!  With a coin he found in the gutter, Charlie wanted a chocolate bar and he went with the most obvious choice: a rectangle covered in a brown paper, accentuated by low-key colors and giant font.  What did he find inside?  Pretty much what was on the outside: a brown rectangle.  Oh, and a golden ticket that wound up changing his life dramatically, but I’m talking about the candy packaging.

I’m not sure why no one has caught onto Willy Wonka’s amazing idea.  The closest anyone has come is probably McDonalds with the monopoly game that they bring out every year where you can win anything from a free hashbrown to a million dollars. If someone said that they were releasing ten tickets in their product, worth however much, they would get bought out just as fast as Wonka did.  Guaranteed.  And they would wind up making way more in sales than they would be giving away.  Of course they would probably need to include a disclaimer that no one would actually be inheriting an entire chocolate factory…

Moving Supplies Shmooving Supplies

Random fact of the day: jellyfish are terrifying.  That isn’t the actual random fact, although it is a fact.  The actual random fact is that Portuguese jellyfish can grow up to a mile long.  Can you imagine the type of prey they catch with that kind of war path?  A mile long?  I mean, that’s over five thousand feet!  It’s just insane.  No creature on the face of this earth should ever be that long.  Ever.  It makes me never want to go into the ocean ever again.  Regular jellyfish are scary enough.  Ones that are a mile long kind of make me think someone has to be making this up.

How many of you would would rather deal with a Portuguese jellyfish over moving?  (Take a minute to think about moving supplies in comparison with giant tentacles a mile long.  Oh, and the tentacles are electrically charged.) I’m thinking not very many.  I’m thinking not very many at all.  And the ones that think they would have either never moved or they’ve moved no less than one thousand times, and each time was a nightmare.  Or they might be descendants of Apollo or Achilles, in which case a Portuguese jellyfish is nothing compared to the skolopendra.

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As for myself, I would rather move every year of my life if it keeps me far away from terrifying nautical creatures.  I don’t even really like fish that much, to be honest.  Although I do have this really cute memory of swimming in a beach in Guam, that crystal clear water and almost white sand, and there were these adorable little tropical fish, like Nemos and Dories, and they were diving into my feet trying to eat my toes.  As my cousin likes to say: totes adorbs.  But you know what isn’t totes adorbs?  Moving supplies.  I’m not gonna lie, as much as I don’t like fish I don’t like piles of boxes and stacks of tape either.  I don’t like the smell of permanent marker or the sound of it squeaking on cardboard.  And yet, still, moving supplies are always the better option.  Sometimes you just have to go with the lesser of two evils.  Anything on land is preferable to something out of your element, anyway.  It’s like this book I’m reading about World War II bomber crews, and the insane amount of stress that came with their job.

I’ll take good old terra firma, thank you very much.

Quality Packing Supplies: What are They?

When it comes to getting your hands on some quality packing supplies there are a couple things that you should take into consideration.  For one, they don’t have to be a name-brand, or sold by a large corporation.  For example, U-Haul sells quality packing supplies, but they also cost far more than anything you are going to buy anywhere else.  I mean, I was downright appalled at UHaul’s prices.  Over three dollars for one, medium-sized box?  Get out of town!  If you were to buy a bundle of medium-sized boxes from an online store you could get about twenty-five for around thirty dollars.  That’s two and a half times more than you would be getting at UHaul’s prices.  Also, the well-known home improvement stores sells quality packing supplies, but they are also upcharged, and there is hardly any variety to speak of.  Like three.  As in, three different sizes of to choose, and three different kinds of tape to choose from.

moving-home

A major component to choosing quality packing supplies is considering what you need.  A lot of times people get frustrated with the materials they are using when it turns out they aren’t using the right kinds of material to begin with.  They think that the material must be crappy, and don’t consider that maybe they made a poor choice (no offense).  If you are moving some heavy stuff, be sure to get heavy-duty boxes.  This way you save yourself the pain and heartache that comes when boxes start tearing and stuff starts breaking.  If you need something to be properly cushioned, don’t just use an old hand towel wrapped around three or four different coffee mugs that you got handed down from your grandmother, use bubble wrap.

Have you ever watched a moving company?  They use blankets to drape over furniture.  They bring rolls of shrink wrap to wrap around awkwardly shaped items.  They use inches of brown paper to protect things inside of boxes.  They use heavy duty tape that doesn’t peel off in a sliver every time you try to use it.  You wind up paying out the wazz for them to do all of this, which is why I recommend that you do it all yourself, but the point is that they know the “quality” in “quality shipping supplies” really lies in what the job calls for, having that on hand, and then using everything appropriately.

 

Cardboard Shipping Boxes for Troops

Some of my friends and I decided to start a little outreach when we were sophomore’s in college, and we were able to keep it running through the rest of our time at the school and even hand it down to others when it was time for us to leave.  I hear that it is still running smoothly, and has even expanded to surrounding campuses.  We called it “Cardboard Shipping Boxes for Troops”.  It was a very simple idea that started with people dropping off small cardboard shipping boxes at a certain spot on campus.  We advertised that we would get donations from local businesses to fill the boxes with and then send them to military personnel overseas.

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Now, my brother had been in the service years before and he readily admitted that getting care packages in the mail from complete strangers was very uplifting, especially when they came with a hand-written letter.  He said that one of of his friends actually got married to a girl that had sent a care package, and he wrote back to her.  My brother did say that things like toiletries were a dime a dozen.  Everyone was sending them.  But what the troops were really after were oreos, or good coffee, or books.  He said that when his squadron got care packages they would unload everything onto a table that was out in the hall.

The table was sectioned off with boxes.  Boxes for candy, boxes for soap, boxes for gum.  Whoever got to open the box naturally had first dibs, and he said that when he came across a box of kettle corn popcorn he snatched it up like pure gold.  So when we decided to launch Cardboard Shipping Boxes for Troops we did go to local businesses for donations, but we went to the local coffee shop and got bags of really good coffee, and we sent a coffee maker for good measure.  We went to the local eye doctors and got sunglasses.  We sent homemade chocolate chip cookies by the dozens.  If we were low on supplies we were always sending out those chocolate chip cookies at least.  It turns out that there is nothing quite so valuable as some of those.

So if you ever get a chance to drop a box off at your local Cardboard Shipping Boxes for Troops site, be assured that the best is being done to send the best possible care package!