FISCHER: Switching up packaging practices

By Travis Fischer, tkfischer@charlescitypress.com

Everybody makes mistakes.

We’ve all been there. Everybody has gotten too busy or too ahead of themselves or maybe just too overconfident and neglected a small and simple detail that should have been a basic task.

For most of us, fortunately, those mistakes often pass by without much notice.

That’s not the case this week for the poor soul in charge of Nintendo’s packaging practices.

The Switch 2 launched last week. Millions of units of Nintendo’s latest console were shipped out to every corner of the world.

This is not an entirely novel experience for the company. Over the last 50 years they’ve packaged up more than 800 million video game consoles to cross oceans on shipping containers, drive cross-country in semis, and get handled by every retail worker and delivery driver before finally ending up in the home of the end user to be opened.

Without downplaying the monumental logistics operation it takes to coordinate a synchronized global release like this, the fact is this is not a new endeavor, but a routine part of their business. A known science. The sort of thing you would expect a company like Nintendo would be able to do in its sleep.

Unfortunately for some Switch 2 owners, particularly those that bought their new console through a Staten Island GameStop, it looks like somebody was asleep this time around.

In the early hours of the launch reports started trickling around online about new Switch owners discovering that when the well-meaning GameStop employees stapled the pre-order receipt to the box of the console, that staple punctured the display screen of the Switch 2.

For some reason, Nintendo decided to package their Switch 2s with the display facing up at the very edge of the box’s interior, leaving nothing but the thin cardboard outer box standing between the system’s most vulnerable component and all of the dangers in the world.

A retailer’s stapler, an errant box cutter, an accidental drop onto anything but a sheer flat surface… the Switch 2’s packaging leaves the screen all but exposed to any number of potentially damaging scenarios. So while the Staten Island Stapler may be the most widely known culprit, it was an accident waiting to happen.

It boggles the mind that such a basic oversight in packaging could not only be made, but go unnoticed or unchallenged until it was too late to do anything about.

Somebody at Nintendo, probably multiple people, had to sign off on that packaging layout. Maybe they thought that it was more important that the first thing their customers see when sliding the package out of the box is the face of the Switch 2, prioritizing aesthetics over function.

Maybe they just weren’t thinking at all and whoever’s job it was to figure out how to get all of the components into the box was only concerned with making it fit and completely forgot that these boxes don’t just magically teleport from the packager to customer’s hands.

It really is kind of difficult to comprehend. As previously noted, this is not Nintendo’s first rodeo. They’ve done this before. They know how to package electronics. The amount of professional negligence it takes to create a situation like this is almost infeasible.

But, apparently, it happens.

While it may be little condolence to gamers in Staten Island, it is a little heartening to know that even multi-billion dollar corporations can have a brain fart.

So whatever you mess up next, just be glad it’s not as obvious as this.

– Travis Fischer is a news writer for the Charles City Press, which would never allow such an error to sneak through profing.