Unwrappers' Delight

Americans can’t resist the lure of elaborate packaging.

- By Amanda Mull

Of all the things I’ve purchased during the pandemic, the most useful has been a box cutter. Until last summer, I had put off buying one for more than 15 years, through no fewer than nine apartment moves’ worth of unpacking with dull scissors and countless struggles against shipping boxes bound by tape re inforced with tiny threads. This knife entered my life as a tool for some minor home repairs, but it’s scarcely exited my right hand since. It doesn’t even have a place to be put away. It is never away.

For more than a year, I have wielded my box cutter like a machete in a jungle of packaging, disassembling boxes taller than I am and smaller than the palm of my hand. I’ve ordered things online that I might have previously picked up on the way home from work, as well as a slew of things that I needed or wanted as life changed: disposable masks, sweatpants to replace the pairs that sprouted holes, a desk chair after my sciatic nerve began to throb. Many of the boxes those items came in contained other boxes that also needed to be broken down. In the at-home hair dye kit I ordered to cover my roots while salons were closed, for example, almost everything inside the box (itself sheathed in a cardboard sleeve) came in its own, smaller box—the tube of hair dye, the disposable gloves, even the single-use plastic bonnet.