I received this jar of Burt’s Bees Almond Milk Beeswax Hand “Creme” (note to marketing: anything made by “Burt” should spell cream C-R-E-A-M) as a gift a while back, but Winter didn’t hit my hands until last week, which is when I pulled the jar off the shelf and went to open it. Do you know what was surrounding the lid? Yes, a safety plastic wrap.
They didn’t have these plastic safety wraps over the tops of jars of things when I was a kid, but they sure do now. They wrap everything. Why? In the case of a jar of plutonium, I guess that having a tamper-evident seal would be pretty darned important, so you made sure you weren’t actually making your thermonuclear warhead with the Play-Do George slipped in as a practical joke last Tuesday. In the case of a jar of botulism toxin, I guess having that tamper-evident seal lets you know that you can safely lick the outside of the jar without going into spasms and dying of asphyxia. In the case of a jar of peanut butter, I suppose you could argue that the tamper-evident seal lets you know your food is safe and hasn’t been modified by… by what? A food terrorist? Yes, a food terrorist, who could still insert some E. Coli into that peanut butter right through the plastic jar with a handy syringe in his or her nefarious scheme to… make you get a stomach bug for Allah?
OK, so that last scenario is getting pretty far-fetched. But I just can’t imagine, I can’t even dream up a scenario in which somebody is going to tamper with a jar of Burt’s Bees Almond Milk Beeswax Hand Creme. Why do I need a tamper-evident seal for this? I’m not going to eat it. I’m not going to use it to make a bomb. I mean, heck, if I’m an allergic-type person it’s already bad news because it’s got nuts in it, so nobody’s going to make my hands itch more by putting stuff into it. Besides, I don’t see how the terrorists are going to undermine Western Civilization by making our hands itch.
So why was this plastic wrapper doo-hickey thing there in the first place, other than as a small artifact of a culture obsessed beyond reality with the idea that They are out to get Us?
It’s reassuring you that nobody bought the jar, tried it, and returned it to the store.
It’s also reassuring that the staff didn’t open it up when winter hit THEIR hands and help themselves to a bit of it when no one was looking–after sneezing, picking their nose, scratching their itchy butt and popping a couple zits.
Nothing prevents that with replaced plastic. This reminds me of the time, ten years back, when I bought a new vacuum cleaner, straight from the big box store, with plastic sealing and big staples on the box and everything. Know what was inside? A bunch of parts from an old rusty lime green Hoover canister vac from the 70s.
And couldn’t someone in the factory have been scratching their itchy butts?
Jim’s example sounds like a pretty clear case of theft, with the proper number of boxes left intact to delay discovery.
But I know what you mean. Why promote condoms for HIV prevention when theoretically all kinds of things could happen to them.
I’m not real sure I’m comfortable with Jim using “old” and “from the 70s” in the same sentence.
Their buttermilk lotion for babies is not sealed on is on the supermarket shelf. I would not buy this and put it on my baby. People are pretty nuts. Who ever thought anyone would put anything in Tylenol? You can do a lot of damage through absorption through your skin.
Yeah, and you really need to look out for people putting poison on the label, too. I mean, it’s possible, isn’t it? Wear gloves when you go outside.
Of course, all Burt’s Bees products are now made by Clorox:
http://irregulartimes.com/index.php/archives/2008/01/13/the-buzz-about-cloroxs-bees/
… so what might they put in there before that tamper proof seal is even put on?
Life is unsafe.