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Pillsbury pie crusts - the kind that come rolled up, 2 in a box, come in a very standard box with the typical two big flaps at the end, one glued over the other, with two little side flaps inside. Safeway store brand pie crusts seem identical but have a slightly more complicated box. One flap peels open easily but the other flap is sort of latched into the little side tabs with little slots, making it hard to peel open. You have to rip the corners apart. It's totally unnecessary. The simpler Pillsbury box works fine.
Until just now my low-stakes conspiracy theory was that the store brand box was deliberately designed to create the disadvantage of being a slight pain in the ass to open. I figured Safeway pie crusts, like most store-brand products, are made by a major manufacturer - probably Pillsbury - and that Pillsbury probably made them under the condition that the package be harder to open, to create a tangible difference between the products.
However, when I started typing this I casually googled and found that Safeway buys their OEM pie crusts from Albertsons. This blows my conspiracy theory but now I wonder even more why the box design is so stupid.
Safeway and Albertsons are the same company (and randalls and tom thumb and about 20 other names). Lots of acquisitions and mergers over the years.
so the real question is where albertsons gets their pie crusts from.
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actually fitting
I'm assuming it's a patent problem.
I srsly doubt that the Pillsbury box design is still under patent, because it's been used in hundreds or even thousands of products I've opened over a span of decades - for example, pretty much every breakfast cereal box works that way. Two main flaps, two little tabs under them at the ends. The store-brand box is something I've never even seen before. Could be that it's designed to be opened along one side, with the "front" of the box opening as a lid. Then the structure would actually make sense. I dunno, next time I make pie I'll have a closer look.
I don't know what I was thinking when I read your original comment, but I thought you meant the ones that come in the tubes. Guess I was half asleep. The extra tabs on the corners sound like they might be for structural support so that they don't get crushed as much when shipping or so that the box they come in can be weaker. I know plenty of the ones with the basic glued design open up on their own when weight is put on it.
Pillsbury probably put money into R&D for their box design and the Safeway white label company is probably using a box design that is older, made by older machines with lower tolerance for mistakes and cheaper glues. Manufacturing engineering is a very interesting field with a lot of budget concerns.