Things that make you go hmmm?

Today I was absolutely astounded by a shining example of modern consumerism in action.

When I was younger it used to be that you could swing by the store, pick up a new toothbrush, walkman or barbie doll... and tear open the flimsy plastic covering with your bare hands so you could use said item even before you'd made it home.

But nowadays when you buy products, especially those of the electronic device variety, they're enclosed in a really hard clear plastic casing.

And I mean REALLY hard!... so much so that even the kitchen scissors won't make a kink in its armour and only a very sharp knife will do... but even then the plastic is so sharp you have to be very careful lest you should cut your finger on it's edges once opened?

WELL!

It appears that some clever person has now developed a special tool SPECIFICALLY for opening this kind of packaging.

It's called the "Safe Opener" (or something) and looks remarkably like a pair of wire cutters... but then I guess, anything which usually lives in Dad's tool shed, isn't really respectable enough to be hanging out in one's nice kitchen drawers.

So instead, one can just pop down to the local Home Depot (or Mitre 10 if you're in NZ) and purchase a nifty pair of kitchen friendly wire cutters for a mere $9.95.

I wonder if the people who make these new fangled thingy-ma-jigs are the very same who invented the extra tough plastic casing in the first place?

If so, they were very clever indeed.