John Russell Dunn

Recently, someone Rockefellered the plastic caps on all the beverage bottles. I appreciate the concept: Decrease the plastic used per lid. Reduce the amount going into landfills. I get it.

But I object to the way it was done. Now the threads don’t line up so well and I have to reverse turn the cap to align the threads before I begin. Also, I have to twist the cap a second time to get the lid closed.

Why should this bother me? Who am I to begrudge them this change? My problem comes when some packaging consultant decides that my convenience – my time – is expendable.

Tweak and tinker to your heart’s content. But let’s keep an eye on the quality, shall we? And don’t assume that my time is a commodity you can expend at will.

J. D. Rockefeller experimented with fewer and fewer drops of solder to seal five-gallon kerosene cans. I appreciate this lesson as well as the next man. If you can invest less material or time and still produce a quality product, by all means, do so. But today’s business metrologists have forgotten half of this very American tradition. We’ve forgotten the part about making a quality product.

When my plastic wrap can’t support its own weight long enough to cover a bowl, we’ve taken things too far. When I can’t pour from a two-liter bottle without fearing it will collapse, when the tuna in my can bears more similarity to a poker chip than a hockey puck (when they say packed with water, they really mean packed), when the infra-red non-motion detector for the public toilet I’m using turns it into a bidet, it’s time we reexamined our priorities.