We live in a world of hardship. There’s hunger, homelessness, financial difficulties, war, strife and pain.
Now, we have another thing to overcome: loud potato chip bags.
Wait. What?
Driving home last week I heard a radio story about Frito Lay’s recall of bags of its popular Sun Chips. There wasn’t a problem with the chips inside. Instead, the complaints centered on the loudness of the bags. Several years ago, after years of research and tons of money, Frito Lay announced it was moving all its Sun Chips into compostable bags. The bags, which look like almost any other chip bag, are designed to decompose and not take up space in a landfill.
Great idea, right? Well, until the bags actually hit the store. That’s when the noise hit the fan.
Shortly after the compostable bags were released, complaints started rolling in that they were too loud.
“It sounds like a metallic screeching cat,” one user said on the radio story.
More than 50,000 people agree. That’s how many – 50,532 as of presstime – joined the Facebook group “Sorry But I Can’t Hear You Over this Sun Chips bag.” You can compare that to 15,976 that are members of the “I Love Math” group or the 4,487 that are part of “Save the Whales.”
Wanting to find out for myself, I went and purchased one of the supposedly offensive bags. I brought it into the office, told everyone to try it out and left it on the counter.
At various times during the day, I heard the crinkling of the bag, indicating someone was testing out the new bag (or was just hungry). Sure enough, by the end of the day, the chips were gone and the bag was ready to go to the compost heap.
This little test proved to me two things. The first is stale bread would get eaten if it was left out in our office and secondly, loud bags don’t really scare people away from chips.
Unfortunately, it’s too late for Frito Lay. They’ve announced they are not going to use the compostable bags except on their original flavor of chips. Apparently, fans of original chips aren’t as bothered by the noise.
I’m not sure if quieter chips bags make the world a better place, but we do know they will make those 50,532 people happier.
At least, that is, until they find something else to complain about.