Fixing What Isn't Broken

Enough with philosophy, let's talk about something important: The travesty that is the new packaging for Fig Newtons.

I've been eating Fig Newtons for more than forty years, and as anyone who knows me knows, there isn't much about food I'm passionate about other than Figgies. I am proud to be the inventor, as far as I know, of the excellent combination of Fig Newtons and Cheese. Anyway, Fig Newtons have had the same packaging for as long as I can remember, and there wasn't a thing wrong with it.

But I suppose the new MBAs at Nabisco needed to justify their existence by being "innovative", so they innovated a major backwards step in the Fig Newton experience. Why did they have to pick on my poor Figgies? Could they have at least thought a little before destroying the packaging?

The first time I saw the new packaging, I got a sick feeling in my stomach; the same feeling I got when I first encountered "fat-free" Fig Newtons. And just as my early-warning radar was right with respect to disgusting fat-free Figgies, so it was with the "improved" packaging. The stupid rip open, allegedly resealable top is too sticky and gloms onto my hand when I'm reaching for a cookie. The opening itself is too small, so I have the choice of either destroying several cookies to make room to reach the others, or ripping the packaging so the reseal is broken. The old Fig Newton "stacks" were handy to carry around; a stack was just the right size for a teenage snack (or a 40-year old snack, for that matter). The stack packaging could be manipulated with one hand, so you could handle the cookies and the TV remote at the same time. The packaging was about as efficient as possible since it barely took more space than the cookies themselves. Now I've got to deal with the decision of carrying around a handful of free-floating cookies or the entire monstrosity of packaging.

This is not progress.