Holiday Shopping Offers Green Proof

Forget about stamping, embossing, high-gloss packaging, design work, artwork or anything else physical about a package at this time of year. You've got your list, you know what you're looking for. What the package looks like doesn't matter as long as it easily identifies that it matches the item on your list. BUT, that being said, there is plenty of impulse buying going on right now no doubt, and packaging of course plays a huge role in it. While I haven't done much impulse buying this season (like they sing in Sweeney Todd, "Times is hard"), I still notice packaging. If I didn't notice it after being at a magazine called packagePRINTING for two and a half years, there would be something seriously wrong with me!

So I'm at Best Buy the other day searching for a piece of software from my wife's list and marveling at how many people are NOT at the store. Jen is looking for Adobe Photoshop Essentials. Once I got help finding it, I noticed how small the packaging was for it and all the other software in the store. I remember back a few years ago when software companies stopped printing manuals to go with their software, opting instead to direct people to PDF files on their Web sites. You might say they were starting to think greener even then. What didn't change though was the packaging for the software. Although the companies ditched the manuals, the packaging was still built to accommodate them. Not so today. I don't know if it was because retailers changed the style of their shelves, or maybe because software companies wanted to increase the number of items that could be fit in the real estate provided to them, or if they were trying to be greener, but it was refreshing to see that they have reduced the overall footprint of their packages.