Zip-Flation
A little speculation on the spooky world of manufacturing
Everyone keeps talking about unemployment data and wage growth and jobs reports. And I’m over here thinking about Ziploc bags.
That was inspired by this comment on a Reddit thread about all sorts of products whose quality or value seems to have deteriorated following the pandemic. A bunch of people were complaining about resealable bags not working well nowadays, and someone in a manufacturing firm answered:
I make ziploc bags, so I have some insight into what's going on. It’s a bit complicated, and thus long, so I apologize for that.
Extruding a functional zipper is actually rather complicated, and is very sensitive to even the tiniest adjustment. Assuming that gets done correctly, there are seemingly infinite ways to bond said zipper to a bag. The most reliable way to do that (imo) is immediately after the bag film is formed. That is what we do.
Now we don’t tend to have much difficulty making a good bag and zipper because that’s all we do, to the tune of over 1M bags per day.
Where things start to fall apart is when you make that a secondary process. This is the case with most products with a zipper bag. Their primary concern is making the product, not making a zipper bag.
Best case (and most expensive) scenario, they’re using a roll of film with zippers already present. Then all they have to do is fold it, zip it, load product into it and heat seal/cut the bags apart. Sounds simple enough, but that heat seal down the side is the weakest part. Do that wrong, and the bag splits down the seams when opened, and product goes everywhere.
A slightly cheaper alternative is to buy separate rolls of film and rolls of zipper, adhere the zipper to the film, and then the process is as described above. The problem with this method is that getting a zipper to adhere to film well is really hard to do without it all being really hot (like 3/4 of the way to melted). That’s easy when you’re making the film and zippers together, but not really an option is you're doing it later. The film is typically already printed, and the dimensions can’t change, so heating everything up is a no go.
Regardless of the method used, it’s essentially melting just the surface of the two pieces of plastic enough for them to stick together. They’re basically hot glued together. Not ideal in the first place, so you can imagine how little would have to go wrong for that zipper to just peel right off when you go to open it. It’s also worth noting that their costs have gone up too, so that film is probably a bit thinner than it was a couple years ago, in an effort to keep costs down.
On top of all that though, is probably the biggest complicating factor of all. People. People need money, and everything is more expensive now. Many of these companies have not raised their wages to keep up with inflation, and so have lost many of their experienced operators to other places that have. The people that remain are inexperienced, not paid enough to give a damn, or both.
Unfortunately none of that is easy, or quick, to fix. It would also require upper management at all these companies to pull their heads out of their asses, and we all know that’s not happening. In short, don’t expect quality to improve much any time soon.
It’s impossible that all of the disruptions in the economy, and all of the churn, retirement, death, moving, re-careering, etc. of the last four years wouldn’t have an effect on the manufacturing of physical things, isn’t it? And yet it’s kind of…spooky to consider.
I’m not sure we really think about how fragile and contingent manufacturing is. Worn parts, parts out of alignment, experienced hands who know the quirks of some piece of machinery, maintenance technicians retiring and being replaced by less experienced ones, parts backordered or out of stock or discontinued or made to so slightly different of a spec that they don’t work just so… Factories are like Scrooge’s senses: a little thing affects them.
I first began thinking about this well over a year ago, when I bought milk a couple of times and both times the perfectly sealed container had a small leak. It didn’t have a hole, and it hadn’t been opened. It just…hadn’t quite sealed, and in the right position it leaked a little bit. I realized I was looking at a bad batch of milk bottle caps, which had gotten out of a factory without being noticed—maybe a different plant than before, maybe on a day when the quality control tech didn’t clock in, who knows.
I had a couple of other experiences like this, definitely including the phenomenon of resealable bags for food products that do not open or do not seal—very small things, but things that point to the fragility of everything. I wonder how much of the economic anxiety we seem to be feeling isn’t about actual conditions, but rather the fact that we now realize we’re not immune to collapse. Knowing, feeling, that it’s possible for things to get worse is almost the same subjective thing as things getting worse.
Some other interesting bits from that Reddit thread. This one, on what might be behind declining produce quality:
We’ve made it harder for temp/migrant workers. Less food harvested the less comes to stores and what does is going to be lower quality. I have noticed potatoes quality have been going down since pre pandemic but I remember around the early pandemic a lot were destroyed, could be farms have shut down due to those massive loses and supply isn’t where it was. More bruises and cuts from the machines they use to dig them out with. I just assumed it was trying to overcrowd the field and the machines can’t handle them as well along with likely changes to the plant itself and making them more delicate.
Yesterday it was my Trader Joe’s teabags, about 10 had paper defects making them unusable. You might get one or two occasionally in the past, but now I’m not surprised when it’s in every box.
Resealable packaging is hardly functional now. I mean, I know how to use it and didn’t have problems with it before. But now almost every once I open just splits on the bag side. Esp with pet products.
My floss picks, my electrolyte powder, shredded cheese, the list goes on. At least 50% of the time the zipper just rips away from the inside of the bag.
String cheese wrappers for me. The packaging doesn’t even separate properly anymore. Before the pandemic, those never gave me an issue, now 80% of the time they don’t open right.
There are a bunch of comments about food from the supermarket, not expired, being spoiled. A whole bunch of people recount milk that tastes old or slightly off, though fresh according to the date. (My wife and I visited a dairy plant outside Lancaster last year, and they gave us little bottles of milk to try. It was extremely tasty. The tour guide explained that the milk at this plant was chilled very cold very quickly, whereas at most plants, it sits hot for awhile, accelerating spoilage. I imagine something temperature-related happened either at the plant or in transit). Lots of people had or liked comments like this:
I’ve been getting a lot of bad milk lately from different stores too. Not sure what’s going on, but milk that is about halfway to spoiled when I open it up. It’s a problem I never had before the pandemic. Now I half way expect it. :(
I smell it first thing when I open it. I didn’t use to have to do that.
We got spoiled food a couple of times during the pandemic. I assume either in transportation or stocking, somebody messed up, or a refrigerated truck wasn’t working properly. Those are the gaps you get when parts and labor are squeezed.
A couple more:
Oh my god, I thought it was just my clumsy heavy-handed ass. Not sure why I thought that because this only started happening fairly recently, and I’ve been this way my whole life.
These comments could have been written by me, except the brand names and currency don’t match (I’m in the UK). However, everything else had me shouting “yes, same!” in my head.
For example, the top brand sweetcorn (corn) we buy has nearly doubled in price (from 50p to 90p), but the quality has dramatically deteriorated. There are at least two or three discoloured kernels and/or bits of husk in every tin (can) now, whereas before you’d have had one or two ‘bad’ bits in every four or five tins, if that.
Similar with the frozen peas (again, a good brand). They’ve had a ginormous price hike PLUS a reduction in pack size, and now every serving from the pack has several stalks, or brown peas, or whole/partial pods; before, you’d sometimes have a whole pack with barely one poor quality pea, let alone a pod or other flaw.
Yet another example I’ve just thought of is toilet paper. Again, the sharp price increase, but worse than that is that not only have the rolls got ‘looser’ (seemingly less actual product for your money), they’re now really roughly cut with little bits flying off and littering the floor, and the ply unravels easier and it’s just so much worse in terms of quality.
There are so many more anecdotes in here, which add up to evidence of a real disruption in how things get made and delivered to stores.
Very broadly, the pandemic and its fallout was a clarion call that we are embodied creatures, that the physical world matters, that doing things in or via digital space strips away something essential to the human experience. Digital technology is a sort of metaphysical magic trick, making it appear as though some dimension of reality lacks a physical substrate.
This all reminds me of a comment on a previous piece touching on manufacturing: “We can’t build the world we live in.” What we have now is the result of building on the past. When you lose that, you can’t pick it up. You might have to start all over again.
Related Reading:
You Never Know How It Falls Apart
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Thank you. One thing people never take into account is the human capital required to produce things. Some jobs require very little skill and can just be churned without too much drop off (like warehouse picking), but when you start to add machinery and increase the complexity, you want build and maintain an experienced workforce. There always ends up being some process quirk or workaround utilized by the workers on the floor that was never planned for or even noticed in the upper levels of the company (this ‘automated’ process gets stuck in a loop here and has to be reset, that angle or sensor is always 3 degrees off, so factor that in, you can’t use both of these lines at once because they’ll freeze up, etc.). Things like that aren’t typically written down in the instruction manuals or the SOPs, and get developed and passed on by word of mouth, so to a top-down view of the whole system, they don’t exist, but they’ll essential to the smooth operation of the endeavor. That’s why the workforce disruption of the pandemic is still causing havoc, many of the experienced hands were on and off unemployment, many decided it was time to retire, and many others took other jobs and aren’t coming back. You can restart the machinery of the production lines fairly easily if they’ve been idle for months, but losing the people who knew their ins and outs is much more difficult to overcome.
Although I generally agree -- I've had my own issues in the last year with plastic deli bags -- I think we can't remind ourselves enough that some of this "anecdata" is just confirmation bias and availability heuristics.
The internet is a big place. The world is a big place. One plastic bag manufacturer might be doing better than another at any given time, in a number of complex ways that may or may not relate to the pandemic. One person starts a thread about it on the internet, and everyone who's recently had an issue, related to the pandemic or not, is going to pipe up and add their own story that the thread has prompted them to remember.
Hell, that's precisely what I did! I couldn't give you any precise statistics on my daily interactions with industrial mistakes before and after the pandemic; all I can bring up is a handful of deli bags that stuck out to me.
But overall, I think the narrative is correct. We've seen this with Boeing, and with GM before it: Overly financialized corporate leadership tends to obsess about the financials and ignore quality and/or safety. GM is basically an insurance and auto loan company attached to a legacy car design firm that's mostly outsourced its manufacturing.