• New York Times, Wednesday, September 8, 2010 10:49 AM

Stephanie Clifford reports that Amazon's efforts to convince manufacturers to adopt "frustration-free packaging" that gets rid of plastic cases and air-bubble wrap is a tale of two realities.

On the one hand, frustration-free products earn a 73% reduction in negative feedback on the Amazon site on average. On the other hand -- which is no doubt armed with scissors, pry bars and Leatherman tools -- only about 600 of the millions of products Amazon sells come in easier-to-open packaging. And other major retailers such as Target and Wal-Mart have been slow to join the crusade.

"A lot of it is just the inertia of making changes," Stephen Lester, science director at the Center for Health, Environment and Justice, tells Clifford. To speed things along, Amazon is taking angry customers' complaints straight to the manufacturers.

Philips, for one, listened and has changed the packaging on an electric toothbrush. Not only is the new packaging easier to remove, it's cheaper to produce and friendlier to the environment because the square footage of material used is much smaller and the cardboard used is recycled and recyclable.

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