The orientation of food caps, lids, pulltabs

[Carson Dyle]

I opened a new plastic bottle of honey today and noticed that the lid opened to the 'wrong' side for my right-handed self. When the little bear on the container faces me with his little smiling bear face, and I take him out of the cupboard and flip open the cap, it points to the right. Which is all wrong and gets in the way.

And I noticed this weekend while drinking cans of beer (beer, not bear) that none of the pull tabs were oriented the same with respect to the can labeling. Meaning that as I was drinking my beer, sometimes I was looking at the front of the can and reading the label, and sometimes I was not.

It would have thought it to be trivial in this day and age of robotics and vision systems used in manufacturing and packaging to orient labels and caps and lids in a precisely desired direction. I'm surprised that it isn't done more to reinforce that all-important brand recognition.

 

[OverVolt]

I get what you are saying but it just doesn't bother me. The throughput on those machines is insane. Its one additional step but its one additional step per can and those production lines make thousands of cans a minute. So thousands of additional manipulations to align the lid.

 

[IronWing]

So for one day, just one time, a right-handed person experiences what lefties have to deal with EVERY SINGLE DAY and find the experience uncomfortable enough to whine about it on the internet. Even in your time of trauma the thought of having the cap placed in a neutral position never occurs to you, only the desire to restore the status quo and return to your position of privilege. LLM, bubba, LLM.

<== leftist SJW

 

[OverVolt]

He will move on to hand blown and aligned glass bottles soon enough and leave us peasants with our beer can tabs facing every which way.

 

[Carson Dyle]

So for one day, just one time, a right-handed person experiences what lefties have to deal with EVERY SINGLE DAY and find the experience uncomfortable enough to whine about it on the internet. Even in your time of trauma the thought of having the cap placed in a neutral position never occurs to you, only the desire to restore the status quo and return to your position of privilege.

That might be a valid complaint, except that it was almost certainly random. If you were to design it to see that it lined up a certain way, it would only make sense to accommodate the vast majority of people who are right-handed. But maybe you've hit on something ... it would be far more PC to just let it be random and not be accused of discriminating against one or the other.

 

[OverVolt]

And here I thought the important thing was making lots of cans so that they were cheap. 2016 is tough.

 

[Carson Dyle]

And here I thought the important thing was making lots of cans so that they were cheap. 2016 is tough.

The thing would be to ask whether or not the added value of the orientation of the label with respect to the pulltab would be worth the added expense. It's clear that in 2016 it would be easily doable and wouldn't slow down the filling line at all (requires a longer line, but wouldn't affect the fill rate). But it is more production equipment to maintain.

 

[skyking]

Once you pull the tab, the looking at labels time is over man. It is officially the drinking time.

 

[Skeeedunt]

You were already dumb enough to buy that can of Budweiser, your patronage is not in question. Instead you must allow that valuable brand signage to radiate out to your colleagues, infecting their subconscious with not only the desire to drink, but also with the imperceptible reality that you, too, are also currently drinking. See and be seen my friend.

 

[Linux23]

Not sure if SRS

 

[Carson Dyle]

You were already dumb enough to buy that can of Budweiser, your patronage is not in question. Instead you must allow that valuable brand signage to radiate out to your colleagues, infecting their subconscious with not only the desire to drink, but also with the imperceptible reality that you, too, are also currently drinking. See and be seen my friend.

Exactly my point.

 

[DrPizza]

I think that if you spent 10 minutes watching a few "how it's made" videos and saw how fast those assembly lines are moving, you'd realize that orienting the cans a particular way would create a huge bottleneck. (Minor pun intended.)

 

[kranky]

It could probably be done, but apparently they see no need to do it.

 

[DrPizza]

You can see that as they're moved through the process after printing, it would be impractical to move them in a manner which maintains rotational orientation.

 

[DrPizza]

A slow machine filling cans; you can see how the cans are spinning somewhat randomly as they move through the assembly line here:

 

[DrPizza]

And finally, at a rate of 52,000 cans per hour:

 

[OverVolt]

I also watched some how its made because of this thread and I was thinking the exact same thing about how they are spinning randomly as they whizz by at 1800cans/minute.

 

[rumpleforeskin]

knew a chap who would get annoyed if he seen someone eating a packet of chips upside down.

 

[twinrider1]

OP, you need to switch to bottled beer.

 

[FeuerFrei]

Yeah, I'd think they'd sweat details such as label orientation on canned drinks. A trivial alignment could have far reaching effect on the visibility of the brand. It's all about conspicuous consumption. Do you want the drinker's hand to cover your precious logo? Do you want nutritional facts facing the drinker? Do you? Hmm??

 

[Cheesemoo]