Generic Soda Can - Detail - © pixelsquid.com

Dear Supermarket Manager 2.0…

Yesterday, I wrote to advise you of a new scam being perpetrated on your customers by major food manufacturers: the promulgation of plastic bottles with dangerously thin walls which can burst on opening. Now, I’ve got another bone to pick…Beverage Can Manufacturing Process - Large - visy.com.au

The beverage can manufacturing process: Note the initial ‘ironing’ (forming)
step that takes place in the upper left hand corner of the diagram…

Dear Supermarket Manager:

Please bear with me while I relate a little story that’s extremely relevant to my reason for writing you today…

There’s a line in the movie Apollo 13 in which a NASA host is telling a group of Senate Oversight Committee members about the Lunar Lander.

“In some places,” he reveals, proudly, “The skin of the LEM is no thicker than a couple of layers of aluminum foil.”

They had to keep the weight of the Moon lander as low as possible just to get it there, and get it back off the surface so the astronauts could go home. Understandable and prudent in that context.

But the sneaky thinning of the walls of aluminum beverage cans to save on cost and weight is a self-defeating exercise. Beverage manufacturers have been ordering their cans from the metal smiths with thinner and thinner walls for some time and it’s gotten to the point where the cans often can’t stand up to the jostling and handling of the filling, sealing and packaging process.

I purchased four cases of [your store brand] Diet Ginger Ale at your market yesterday and was shocked to find that 3 of the 48 cans were pin-holed and spewed product all over the place when they were removed from the cardboard cases. A fourth had a larger triangular puncture in the side wall and had ‘bled’ out entirely in the case, mucking up the rest of the contents.

These defects could only have happened in the manufacturing, filling or packaging processes. And the can makers employ exhaustive quality control measures. (See illustration, above.)

And I’d bet you a case of your product that they happen because the walls of the cans have become so tin. Aluminum beverage cans are made by stamping out thick, flat ‘cups’ of the metal and then ‘ironing’ them out thinner and thinner in a cylindrical form until they constitute the bottom and sides of a seamless can. This is, in essence, a multiple stretching process and we all know what happens when you stretch something too thin – be it a party balloon or a hernia – it eventually bursts.

Please tell your head office types to retreat on the can thinning thing! Or, sooner rather than later, there will be a major drop in your sales when fed up customers abandon your house brands.

With my sympathy that you are once again stuck in the middle of the issue, I remain your devoted customer,

~ Maggie J.