The Secrets That Product Packaging Reveals About Retail

In the mid-to-late 1800s, shoppers interested in purchasing many everyday products—from flour to crackers to pickles—usually had to ask store attendants to fish what they wanted out of a barrel for them. Customers would then transport their goods home in a cloth sack, a paper bag, or wrapped in paper.

Shortly after the turn of the century, the burgeoning field of marketing brought consumer products out of barrels and into individual jars, cans, tubes, and other containers emblazoned with corporate iconography. “Branding really led the way towards packaging that looks the same in Des Moines as it did in New York City,” says Sean Riley, a spokesperson for the trade group PMMI, which used to stand for the Packaging Machinery Manufacturers Institute.

Today, as people buy more and more products online, product packaging is again changing, in a way that reflects the differences between digital and physical retail: Anything bought online