After the 1982 Chicago Tylenol murders¹, the FDA made companies started adding those annoying foil inner seals to the tops of medicine bottles to stop people from opening bottles, adding poison, then putting them back on the shelves. Now they’re also used in food and drink products. Everyone knows how infuriating these things can be. Do you try to peel it off? Try to jam your thumb into it? Use a knife or scissors? It’s better than dying of cyanide poisoning, but only just.

That’s why I smiled when I first saw a Lift ‘n’ Peel seal on a beverage container, some time around 2015 or 2016. In the company’s own words:

The proprietary Lift ‘n’ Peel™ easy-open seal consists of a half moon pull tab that has been designed to be ergonomically easy-to-grip, flexible, and extremely strong.

Instead of fiddling around, you just grab the pull tab and pull, and it comes right off. Amazing. It wasn’t long before I started seeing them everywhere, and now they’re used all over the world.

Or it was amazing at first, when they actually worked. Now, the first thing you see besides the company’s own website if you Google “lift n peel” is a bunch of Reddit threads about the seals on /r/mildlyinfuriating. People hate them. The pull tab often comes off without removing the underlying seal, or the thing is stuck on too hard and won’t come off, and you hurt your fingers trying. This matches my experience, where they used to work great, but now nearly every single one might as well be a normal foil seal.

I wonder what happened? Is this a classic case of the enshittification strategy? That is:

Make something great to attract users.
Insert yourself everywhere.
Cut costs until you’re adding almost no value.

With this strategy, companies insert themselves as middlemen and skim off every transaction, and as long as the value they produce is slightly positive, they get to stick around. Like a tapeworm that gives just enough nutrients to its host to keep it alive. This could also be called the Amazon effect, since Amazon is now rife with counterfeit and garbage products, and customer support has gotten shittier, but I’ve heard a rumor it’s still great in countries like Sweden where they’re still in stage 2 of the enshittification process.

I can’t tell whether this story holds up with respect to Lift ‘n’ Peel though. It’s possible the kind people at The Selig Group really, truly care about how well their Lift ‘n’ Peel seals work for the end user. Several reddit comments, including one comment from someone claiming to have spoken to a manufacturing engineer at a food plant that uses these, claim that the individual companies that apply the seals are to blame. If the companies follow directions, the seals will work well. But if they stamp the seals on really hard, they can put more of them on faster, and therefore produce more products more quickly. This has the side-effect of making the seals not work properly, as they end up bonded to the edge of the container.

If that’s the case, I’ve been incorrectly blaming the Lift ‘n’ Peel people every time one of their seals doesn’t work. When in reality, each company that uses the seals gets to choose for itself where it wants to be on the quality–quantity spectrum, adjusting for its own current stage of the enshittification strategy. And Lift ‘n’ Peel is simply a tool they can use to make this choice. Need to attract more users? Make the seals work better. Need to exploit existing users for profit? Skimp on the seals. In that way, anything that adds quality but can easily be changed in the future to save costs is something that can enable enshittification.

Unless quality is somehow locked in, we can expect companies to cut corners once they have the market positioning to do so. By word or by deed, they make sweet promises, but they do not fulfil those promises. For most people, Lift ‘n’ Peel seals have become another of life’s minor annoyances. But if you pay attention, you’ll see they’re a tiny part of the war between users and profit — the unceasing war of company–user alignment.

The 1982 Chicago Tylenol murders are the lamest “unsolved” murders in existence. While nobody was ever charged for the murders, we know James William Lewis sent a letter to the Tylenol manufacturers shortly after the murders, demanding a million dollars in exchange for stopping the killings, along with diagrams of how to load the capsules with cyanide — the poison used in the killings. According to his own timeline, which states it took him three days to write the letter, he started writing the letter before the first news reports of the poisonings. He was never charged with the murders due to a lack of evidence. I guess a letter saying “I did it” written before public knowledge of the case doesn’t count as evidence? Anyway, he was charged with extortion at least, and got 10 years. He was eventually released, despite a letter he’d written stating his intention to kill more people with cyanide-laced Tylenol. Fortunately, he’s now dead. ↩

Footnotes

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