The Five Ws of Stretch Wrap Film

Posted on December 17, 2015 by Alex Kava

Ah yes, the five Ws. We’ve seen them before in the case of cheap cardboard boxes, and probably bin liners, and most certainly packaging tape. Now… now we see them in the case of stretch wrap film. What are the five Ws, you may ask? The who, what, when, where, and why of stretch wrap film, of course! Watch:

Who: In keeping with the times, stretch wrap film does not discriminate, and this means that it can be used by anyone and for anyone. Hand held rolls for the pallet wrapper (don’t forget the dispenser, which will make the job so very much easier, take my word for it), or machine grade size for the machine operator.

Polypropylene sheets that crinkle and twinkle for the gift basket maker. Saran wrap for the caterer or soup kitchen director or homemaker. Poly sheeting for the serial killer (I couldn’t help it. Dexter must have spent an absolute fortune on poly sheeting… and he still had to wind up going off to the woods and growing a beard…).
Stretch Wrap Film

What: Stretch wrap film is pretty self-explanatory, but I will humor the W in the name of what is going on here. Stretch wrap film is that flexible and clingy plastic that can be saran wrap when dealing with food and pallet wrap when dealing with industrial things. Also belonging to the family is shrink film; or poly tubing, which you can make your own size packaging bags from if you have the correct accessories (namely, the heat sealer).

When: At this point I may be kind of repeating myself, but stretch wrap film is used in simple everyday situations (like trying to preserve your leftovers) and in not so simple everyday situations (like trying to secure a pallet of boxes). It is better to have the option of those chicken strips for tomorrow, or to reduce the hazard of losing thousands of dollars of product and safety concerns, too, is what I always say.

Where: at PackagingSupplies.com you can find all of the products with which to satisfy your stretch wrap film needs, amongst a host of other things.

Why: Don’t you like to dress up those gift baskets you hand out every Christmas? Don’t you want to save money on expensive cloth drop cloths and just use a piece of clear poly sheeting instead? The why is pretty simple, people. Preservation of any and all kinds: food, products, people, gifts… The list is endless.

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Cheap Shipping Boxes and Beyond

Posted on December 15, 2015 by Alex Kava

What do you get when you put ‘cheap’ and ‘shipping boxes’ together? Why, cheap shipping boxes of course! And I’m not talking about crappy quality containers, I’m talking about affordable because cardboard should be affordable. It sucks when the storage or shipping item costs upwards of whatever it is holding. Like when you go to Bed Bath and Beyond and pick out something for someone’s wedding gift registry, and then you have to go out and drop eight dollars on the fancy shmancy bag to wrap it in! I mean, you have to use one of those twenty percent off coupons just for the packaging. It does make tend to make one a little sick. Which is why cheap shipping boxes are such a breath of fresh air.

PackagingSupplies.com is an online supplier for all packaging and shipping supplies or needs, and even beyond. They offer retail items at wholesale prices- and even industrial, commercial, specialty, you-name-it items at wholesale prices. This is where you can honest to goodness get cheap shipping boxes that are still good quality shipping boxes but also cheap at the same time. I know that it doesn’t sound like it should make sense, or even that it can make sense, but it turns out that there are still businesses out there who’s goal is to keep their customers by providing them a quality item at competitive prices with amazing service.

PackagingSupplies.com is exclusively an online company, which winds up working in the favor of the customer. When you visit the website you are assured that anyone involved in the business doesn’t have to be splitting their time between locations and all of the issues and responsibilities that go along with buildings, people, and paperwork.

If you are looking for more than cheap shipping boxes, look no further. Remember those stinking gift bags I was complaining about earlier? Well, you can even buy some versions of this at PackagingSupplies.com. And if you choose to not go with a bag, you can get all sorts of acceptable looking boxes to wrap your stuff in, too. Why bother putting spatulas and placemats in a ridiculous bag when you can just access your stash of gift boxes, choosing between kraft, white, black, red, gold, or silver?

There are sizes small enough for a ring, and large enough for something, well, much larger. Even if you aren’t looking for something else, there’s a good chance that when you go to buy some cheap shipping boxes you will wind up finding a bunch of other stuff that you’ve been needing, too.

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I Heart Bin Liners

Posted on December 11, 2015 by Alex Kava

My sister works at a cupcake factory. Those of us who go into such a place just see the finished product behind the glass, looking decadent and amazing. Or, like at my sister’s place of employment, you can see some of the employees mixing together batters and icings and whatnot in giant, industrial size mixers.

They pour ingredients in from enormous tubs. None of us ever know the behind-the-scenes, except for me, because I have the ‘inside’ scoop. It turns out that the manager is in charge of ordering supplies, and that there is no type of fairy who harvests cotton candy clouds and cooks them down to make sugar, which they then deliver to the backdoor of sweet shops all around the world.

Bin Liners

A lot of those supplies come in enormous cardboard boxes, the kind we all dreamed about as a kid. The kind we could have made an apartment building out of. In order to keep the contents fresh and clean, there are bin liners which line the bins (aka boxes). These boxes come stuffed to the brim with insane amounts of chocolate chunks, all of which get melted down on site to dip pretzels in, or gummy bears… The bin liners make it easy on everyone. The manufacturer’s job is easier, because they don’t have to worry about their product maintaining its quality. They can just line a bin, slide that baby under some type of dispensing system, and release extreme amounts of peanuts, or coconut flakes, or white chocolate chips (or however it works).

The delivery man’s job is easier, because it’s a lot easier to move cardboard instead of something much more heavy duty. The business owner’s job is easier because, thanks to the bin liners, they don’t have to worry about trying to find a different way to store their product when they get it in. They can just leave it all in the boxes, tie them up at night, and sleep without any worry or care about critters or varmints soiling the goods. It’s all so much easier so that we can walk into a cupcake factory and have an insane amount of flavors and goodnesses to choose from.

If it wasn’t easier, we would probably have just chocolate and vanilla still, instead of lavender pistachio and peanut butter with a chocolate ganache, and all those fancy words. But I’m sure that none of this matters, because I probably had you at, “My sister works at a cupcake factory…”

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Cardboard Boxes: A Few of My Favorite Things

Posted on December 9, 2015 by Alex Kava

It goes without saying that cardboard boxes are one of my favorite things. I say that it goes without saying because without cardboard boxes there would be a serious lack of certain amazing things in my life. For instance, anything off of Amazon. You wouldn’t think about it like that, but it’s totally true.

I couldn’t order awesome books at shockingly low prices and have them arrive at my doorstep a mere two days later if it wasn’t for the advances that have been made in the world of packaging supplies. So, what really goes without saying is that cardboard boxes are one of my favorite things because they [can] hold my actual favorite things. Boxes of books. Literally my favorite thing in the world. Unless it’s a box of snacks from Trader Joe’s that my best friend mailed to me because we don’t have Trader Joe’s on the east coast (or anywhere that I’ve ever lived. What is up with that?). And inside of that box of snacks are the individual cardboard boxes that hold the actual snacks: pumpkin seed and cranberry pita crisps, dark chocolate covered mint truffles, maple syrup and praline instant oatmeal. All of these things in cardboard boxes.

SINGLE WALL, 16/11/05, 6:04 pm, 8C, 2252x3002 (418+675), 80%, CENTREMARK, 1/10 s, R69.0, G68.0, B89.0

You see, cardboard boxes didn’t just revolutionize the packaging and shipping industries. They revolutionized all industries, including the domestic one. The option to package something in cardboard makes it cheaper to purchase and available to more people. Not to mention that pretty much anything can be ordered online now.  Not only that, after you’ve received an order, or what have you, you’ve got a free cardboard box!

So the pile of extension cords can get tucked away, labeled with the hasty scrawl of a permanent marker, and slid up on the top shelf in the basement storage closet. Or you can pick up all the junk your kids constantly leave lying around, stash it in said box, and label it ‘gardening supplies’, so that when they ask if you’ve seen their iPod anywhere, you can say, “Last time I checked it was with the gardening supplies”, and they will think you are being a sarcastic jerk, but one day they just might catch on.

Probably not, though. And then you can bring the box out one Christmas season after everyone has grown up and moved out and have their own kids, and everyone will laugh until they are crying…hopefully…

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Where Are Shipping Boxes Wholesale?

Posted on December 9, 2015 by Alex Kava

I recently did a whole bit about answering questions with a question, and I was really enjoying throwing out some rhetorical questions (i.e. a figure of speech in the form of a question in order to make a point). We’ve all been asked some rhetorical questions.

I’m sure that when I first mentioned it your mind immediately zipped back to a hidden place in your childhood, and this vision surfaces of your father’s face looking down at you, and you hear the echo of your question as it fades away, “But why can’t I trade my brother in?” And your dad goes, “What do you think?” Burn, Dad. Seriously, man.

shipping-boxes

I have to admit that even though rhetorical questions decorate a lot of a child’s memories, I often find myself using them on my son, hoping that they will reveal how foolish he sounds. “Stop chewing on the desk.” “Why?” “Why do you think?” “Think?” “Why do you think you should stop chewing on the desk?” “Desk…” In the end, I’m the one that always winds up looking like a fool, but I’m really hoping that one day it will work. But you get my point.

The question here is: Where are shipping boxes wholesale?

And I will answer that question with this question, “Have you ever been to PackagingSupplies.com?”

You hesitate, recognizing a sense of déjà vu about this whole scenario, but you take the bait anyway: “What is that?”

At which point, once again, I break the cycle to talk about PackagingSupplies.com, and how they sell packaging supplies, and how this is where you can find shipping boxes wholesale. Not only can you find shipping boxes wholesale, in literally hundreds of sizes, shapes, and styles, you can find just about any other obscure and awesome packaging or shipping supply that exists. Any kind of packaging tape (seventeen varieties!)… An absolutely insane amount of plastic bags, for anything from your workshop to your Etsy shop to your bookshop… It’s incredible.

Still skeptical, and still not really knowing if this is déjà vu or not, you say, “Are you sure that this is where I can find shipping boxes wholesale?” Perhaps you don’t believe that such an option really exists, for which I wouldn’t blame you. Finding a good price on any kind of box is really hard to come by. I mean, those suckers are expensive. So I can appreciate and understand your natural mistrust.

But then, grinning once again, I would reply with: “Is Bill Gates rich?”

Get it?

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If There Were No Cardboard Boxes for Sale

Posted on December 3, 2015 by Alex Kava

Take and a minute and try to imagine if no stores had cardboard boxes for sale. Actually, back up a minute. Take a minute and try to imagine what it would be like if we didn’t have access to cardboard boxes. How would we pack up our homes? How would we store things in the garage? If we didn’t have cardboard boxes we probably wouldn’t even have plastic totes because surely the former idea derived from the latter.

I imagine we would be using wooden crates for everything again. I wonder if we would even live lives as complicated as they are. If you really think about it, would we own as much as we do if there were no cardboard boxes? I imagine that online stores wouldn’t really be an option. After all, unless they could mail everything in a bag, surely they wouldn’t even exist?

I mean, all of that stuff comes in cardboard boxes, from the diapers to the books to the electronics. Online shopping would cease to exist! And if that was the reality, then Cyber Monday wouldn’t exist! Cyber Monday was just a couple days ago, and I got some seriously amazing deals. I got like six hundred dollars worth of tools for under two hundred (can I get a “woop woop”?). And this access to tools is a lot more serious than you might assume. We moved into our home, a real fixer upper, over three years ago, and this whole time we have been nickeling and diming our supplies, and struggling and making do.

A nail gun for twenty bucks? You’ve got to be kidding me! This would probably cut putting up trim by hours. All of those tools will be arriving in cardboard boxes. If I couldn’t have ordered them online for rock bottom prices, because they couldn’t be shipped to my home, we would continue to labor through the home remodeling process. I guess the patience and labor is all just part of not wanting to remodel off of credit, but cardboard boxes for sale, I’m realizing as I write this, have really opened up a lot of doors for us!

And if manufacturers didn’t have cardboard boxes for sale, then the place I buy my supplements from wouldn’t have access to them, and then they wouldn’t be able to send me the protein shakes and cellulite reducer to my house. And then I would have cellulite! I refuse to accept this as a way of life, and I’m so stinking glad that I don’t have to.

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Stretch Film Wrap for Miles

Posted on December 1, 2015 by Alex Kava

Does anybody remember that song that goes “I can see for miles and miles and miles..”? I’m sure most of you also remember that it was by The Who, and before we go on I just have a confession to make. I had to Google the lyrics, and it was only then that I realized this was Morrison’s song.

I’m more than a little embarrassed, but I just feel like I had to start on honest ground. And that’s the first part: I didn’t know “I Can See for Miles” was by The Who. Not that it really matters for my story, though. This is because when I was a child, my cousin and brother used to sit in the back seat of our conversion van and sing the chorus over and over and over.

It was enough to drive a child crazy, I’m telling you what. I would sit in the middle seat, one of the bucket seats, you know what I’m talking about, and just pray to God that they would stop. And they knew I was praying that they would stop, which is exactly why they didn’t. I have to admit, my cousin and my brother kind of had it out for me in those days, and it sucked more than a little bit.

All of that leads up to stretch film wrap, though, and this is why: because when I start talking about stretch film wrap I start singing that song in my head (“I can see for miles and miles and miles…”). If you were to find yourself in possession of a roll of it, industrial grade, and if you were to unroll it, you would find that it was two thousand feet long. Two thousand feet of stretch film wrap! This is the smallest gauge, which means it is the thinnest.

You can go thicker, but sometimes it’s not always necessarily to use the really heavy duty stuff. If you just need to go with the heaviest and the dutiest, you would still wind up with a thousand feet per roll. A thousand feet! We all know that a mile is just over five thousand feet, so if you were to buy even just five rolls of stretch film wrap, and lay them out end to end, you would literally have miles of it. Like I said, thinking about stretch film wrap makes me burst into song, High-School musical style: “I can see for miles and miles and miles…!”

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Why I Love Shipping Boxes

Posted on November 25, 2015 by Alex Kava

I never knew how much I loved shipping boxes until I really needed them. Another fancy moniker for this handy packaging product is ‘carton’. Like milk carton, but not really, because they have nothing to do with milk. It’s just that carton is another word for box, specifically when talking about the cardboard kind.

Packaging-Box-Shipping-Carton-Cardboard-Box

When talking about shipping boxes the word ‘box’ and ‘carton’ are technically interchangeable, but I’m going to assume that this audience is neither foreign or over the age of fifty, and so I’m going to stick with ‘box’. If you are either of the two camps listed, then please bypass the offense you may have taken at my blundering assumption and, instead, consider yourself lucky to get a break from the word ‘carton’.

I guess what I love most about shipping boxes is that I can get them at PackagingSupplies.com. It’s really all about more than just the product, right? It’s about where you’re getting it. I can imagine all of those people that are wandering around packaging supply purgatory, unable to find a supplier that they feel they can really do business with. If you can hear me out there, people in packaging supply purgatory, you can be satisfied!

Like the website says, “PackagingSupplies.com strives to be the one-stop source for all your shipping boxes…” Okay, okay, I admit that the website does indeed say ‘carton’, but I committed to saying ‘box’ and, by George, I’m gonna do it. Striving to be the one-stop source is what makes PackagingSupplies.com focused on one-hundred percent customer satisfaction (which the website also says). Since one-hundred percent customer satisfaction is the goal, if you have a question, comment, or concern, they are happy to help in any way they can (also from the website). You don’t have to take my word for it, though, you can see for it yourself right on the website.

In case you are tired of hearing me use the word ‘website’ (just stop saying ‘website’ already, would you! You may find yourselves screaming at the computer screen), I will go back to talking about shipping boxes and why I love them. They come in all shapes and sizes. When I say this, that they come in all shapes and sizes, I’m being serious as a heartattack.

If you are someone like me and you love when things are symmetrical and nice and neat but also packed comfortably and not bulging or sagging in, you will love the fact that shipping boxes can come in all shapes and sizes. There are literally hundreds to choose from at PackagingSupplies.com. Yet another reason…

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Cardboard Boxes: To Keep Or Not To Keep

Posted on November 25, 2015 by Alex Kava

When it comes to cardboard boxes, that really is the question: to keep, or not to keep. It it’s a coffee maker box, probably not to keep. If It’s a box from Amazon, definitely keep. Those are always really good boxes. If it’s from Amazon Prime, anyway. Independent sellers often skimp on their packaging and shipping supplies.

If I get a piece of jewelry, I admit that I keep the box. And you want to know what? I always reuse them! Just last week I had my kids make some cute little ornaments for their grandparents for Christmas, and I used those jewelry boxes to wrap them in. Now they are someone else’s problem, wink wink. Some things don’t even qualify for the question, like the cardboard boxes that toys come in. I mean, technically they are cardboard boxes, but they are more or less scraps of paper by the time you manage to get the toy out.

Therefore, not to keep. Diaper boxes? Absolutely keep! And any large box. Any at all. We got a new toilet, and we kept that box. I have been able to hang onto boxes that size for months at a time, the kids using them for something or other. At one point, we had so many boxes that we were able to build a wall out of them and the kids had the greatest time of their lives crashing through it.

Consider my mother. When it came to cardboard boxes she really had a problem. The entire space beneath her stairs was filled, top to bottom, with boxes. I mean, literally every kind of box. She was absolutely OCD when it came to cardboard boxes. If something came in a box, she would take the box down under the stairs and either find a box it could fit into or find other boxes that could fit into it.

Thus, she had successfully packed together hundreds of boxes. Like some people that can’t bear to throw away food because they didn’t have enough growing up, she couldn’t bear to throw away a box- although this was certainly not bred from some sort of dire need as a child. That being said, she always had a box if you needed one! And you could rest assured that whatever she gave you for Christmas was not the actual picture on the box, although sometimes you may have liked it to have been.

Like that one time she asked for the neighbor’s box that their new blu ray player came in… Man, she could have at least scribbled all over it with a Sharpie or something…

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The Five “W”s of Poly Shipping Bags

Posted on November 20, 2015 by Alex Kava

Who: It may seem silly to personify something like poly shipping bags, but in keeping with the theme (who, what, when, where, why) the ‘who’ might seem pretty obvious, but it’s actually not. At PackagingSupplies.com there are literally forty-six icons to choose from. Like the website says, “shipping and mailing bags, packaging bags and reclosable baggies…”. These are all poly shipping bags.

What: Once again, this may seem rather obvious. Once again, nothing is obvious when there are forty-six choices to choose from. A search selection of ‘poly shipping bags’ could bring up ice bags, wicketed bread bags, static shielding bags, ultra clear polypropylene…. The list is kind of exhaustive (and no, I did not say exhausting).

When: Whenever! Whenever you need some poly shipping bags, PackagingSupplies.com is there! Shrink bags for when you need to shrink some plastic around something, complete with the entire kit (the heat gun), plastic grocery bags for your mom and pop corner market, but also the bag dispenser stand, packing list envelopes and even just trash can liners at wholesale prices for if you are trying to save some money around the house…

Where: At PackagingSupplies.com of course. It really is as easy as one, two, three. Not only is the main website easy to navigate, the mobile site is probably the best I’ve been too. Everything fits on the screen, with just some simple scrolling up and down, and there aren’t a lot of witty pictures or add-ons taking forever to load. It’s just a list of the products, a display of the credentials, and then the categories shown underneath. I kind of wish I needed to order poly shipping bags more than I do simply because it’s so refreshing to have such a wonderful shopping experience.

Why: Does this even need an answer? I mean, why would anyone need poly shipping bags? You could really be asking why anyone needs any type of bag at all. Ultra clear polypropylene for candy shops and goodie stores, coffee bags, a vast array of merchandise bags. Garment bags. Any type of need for poly shipping bags could potentially be fulfilled at PackagingSupplies.com, and that’s a pretty big answer to the ‘why’. Don’t you want to shop somewhere that could give you any kind of product for exactly what you are looking for? If you need some reclosable baggies, does it really matter why?

 

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