Wednesday, June 29, 2005

Matthew Googles

"Doyle has no solid statistics on injuries caused by our hassles with packaging, but they do exist in England. One study there shows that "wrap rage," as it is called by the Brits, has been the cause of more than 60,000 injuries. These often occur when consumers resort to knives and scissors to deal with stubborn packages, according to a 2003 report in the Daily Telegraph."
--Joyce Gemperlein, The Washington Post, But the Dang Thing Won't Open

A little Google work turned up this BBC Business link. 71% of the 2000 readers of Your Magazine (aimed at the over-50 set) surveyed reported having gotten injured by packaging: "In the survey, the most common injury from trying to open packets was a cut finger, followed by cut hand, sprained wrist, bruised hand and strained shoulder muscle."

What I found more interesting was that 99% thought that packaging had gotten harder to open in the past 10 years. This seems like a startling result, until you realize that for people my age, 99% of packaging has probably gotten easier to open over the past ten years. Remember how hard it was to open jars when you were 11? Makes me realize how much the world may change as the people my parents' age keep getting older.

To return to my original point: the original statistic seemed questionable, so I kept digging. this CBS News article claims that 67,000 people suffered from injuries related to packaging in a single year. This seems to me to be suspiciously similar to the 60,000 WaPo statistic, but it's still unsourced. (In 2003, the population of Britain was 59.6 million, so this number suggests that (very roughly) 1 in 1000 Britains has been injured from trying to open a package. It just sounds like a made-up number.)

On a Lexis search, I found a Melbourne Herald-Sun story (can't figure out how to link to Lexis) that cites the BBC News article and the Your magazine article in February of 2004. Before that, there's a Daily Telegraph story from November of 2003 that finally identifies the source of the statistic. A quote:

"CORNHILL Direct has identified "wrap rage" as the latest irritant in modern life to drive Britain's more unstable citizens crazy.
Spokesman Allan Truman says every year more than 60,000 people need hospital treatment for injuries caused by grappling with food packaging. 'About 2,000 accidents happen while people are trying to separate items of frozen food, usually with a knife.'"

Cornhill Direct, it turns out, according to this market research report, is one of the leading advertisers in the over-60 insurance segment. Which leads me to suspect that they're a major advertiser for the aforementioned Your Magazine.

So an insurance company releases a number and then a magazine does a survey. (Obviously, the people who return survey cards about packaging injuries are more likely than the average person to have packaging injuries.) This information is then picked up by the BBC as business news, gets turned into a 'study' by CBS, and is reported by the Washington Post.

Someone has a good PR firm.

(This great Paul Graham essay turned me on to the way PR firms propagate and validate statistics. Thanks Krischelle for linking to "Hiring is Obsolete" on the same site. Most of his articles are addicting. One of my favorites, which I read a long time ago off AL Daily, is this , on essay-writing, why it's associated with literature, the history of writing, how to write, and several other things.)