Author Archives: Mathew Bell

Cardboard Boxes for Sale, Oh My

Saying “cardboard boxes for sale” makes me think of New York in the 1920s, when little boys in apple caps and suspenders were running around hollering, selling newspapers. Except I imagine a different scene, where the little boys don’t have newspapers under their arms, they have a stack of cardboard boxes. “Cardboard boxes for sale, here! Get your box for a buck!” they would shout at you as you passed. How convenient would that be? Pretty stinking convenient, if you ask me. Buying boxes at department stores, for resale prices, will just about break the bank.

And you always wind up needing more than you think you will need, so you always wind up spending more than you were planning on spending, and the whole thing begins to feel like a downward spiral. It would be really convenient if those people standing on the side of the road, the ones holding the signs, were actually selling cardboard boxes. I suppose that the next best thing is this website that has cardboard boxes for sale in bulk, at wholesale prices. It’s called PackagingSupplies.com, and it’s amazing. There are literally hundreds of sizes to choose from, and you can spend like twenty dollars on a bundle of fifteen or twenty.

So I guess we don’t really need little paper boys running around the streets, we can just go online and get what we need from PackagingSupplies.com. You don’t even have to get out of your car! I mean, it doesn’t get much easier. And since the boxes come in bundles, you could buy a couple of different sizes and store them in the basement or the garage to keep on hand and be taking up very little space, which is a bonus. It’s really inconvenient to need a box and not have one around, and its just as inconvenient to try and stash old boxes because you either can’t break them down, or the integrity gets so compromised that when you go to use them you have very little hope of it making out to your car, forget about all of the way to Montana through the hustle and bustle of the United States Postal Service. I guess I’ll just stick to getting my boxes at PackagingSupplies.com, because I can also get the packaging tape, and I can even get a pack of garbage bags which I keep forgetting to get at the store.

Packaging Tape – Aisle Marking Tape

Have you ever wanted to mark an aisle, but then couldn’t because you didn’t have the right kind of packaging tape? Most of you might laugh at this question, because it sounds silly, and I admit that it does. However, it’s a real scenario. If you have ever gone through a warehouse, or an airplane hangar, or a factory of any kind you would never notice that the floor is not plain. Instead, it is covered in boxes and arrows and lines, and all of those are put into place by aisle marking tape.

You know that if you cross over the red and white striped line you will more than likely get your head chopped off by some piece of heavy machinery. If you cross over the yellow and black stripped line you know that you are walking onto the flightline and that you need to make sure you have your personal protective equipment with you. Stay inside the walkways clearly marked with plain white tape when going from point A to point B. If there weren’t these markings on the ground, people would just wander aimlessly, completely exposed to bumping their heads, burning their flesh, and getting crushed.

Packaging Tape

Or, even worse, they would drive their forklifts and wheelbarrows in random patterns, without the aid of guiding lines complete with multiple lanes. We never notice the markings because our brains just process them as a necessary part of the environment, but someone actually had to put them there. Enter: aisle marking tape. At PackagingSupplies.com this would belong to the packaging tape family. They sell it in widths of two or three inches, thirty-six yards a roll, in six different colors (solid or striped).

This tape is specially designed not only because of its colored patterns, but because it is able to handle a lot of abuse while simultaneously standing up against moisture, grease, oil, solvents and scuffing. PackagingSupplies.com also sells this nifty little device called an aisle marking tape dispenser, also available to find under the search for ‘packaging tape’. It looks like the front half of a scooter (namely, the handle bars and front wheel), although including the part that you stand on might be a good idea for the next model.

The tape mounts to the bottom wheel and you can conveniently apply by holding onto the handlebar and pushing it along. If you don’t choose to go the accessorized route, which would allow you remain upright, you are going to need some serious knees pads and a back brace.

Shipping Boxes for Sure

cardboard-boxes-white Shipping boxes. Where would we be without them? We wouldn’t be shipping anything, that’s for sure. Which is sad to think about. Especially around the holiday season. I just sent off two boxes, and if we didn’t have shipping boxes I wouldn’t have been able to do that. In one of the boxes I sent off birthday presents and Christmas presents!

Thank goodness that my best friend and her boys all have their birthdays in the fall, so that I don’t have to worry about sending out two shipments. Ya feel me? They are in October, November, and December, so if I send something off in November it’s perfect. Thankfully, she does not expect a lot of hoopla and fanfare when it comes to presents or gifts of any kind, and we normally just send something small for the kids and as much as we can for each other. I really do love putting together a nice care package. I tend to buy stuff for her throughout the year, hoarding it until I’m ready to send it off.

I also sent a care package to my little sister who spent forty-four days in jail. Yup, it’s true. Forty-four days in the slammer. My baby sister. Thankfully she is so far beyond what put her there in the first place, but even though the incident was months and months ago she still wound up having to serve time thanks to the priorities of the judicial system. Can’t really blame them.

I mean, they are probably processing people and their poor choices all day every day, and so if my sister’s hearing lands six months after the crime, what are you going to do? But that’s neither here nor there. The point is that when it came to sending my sister a care package I need shipping boxes! Or at least one. Otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to express how proud of her I am. It’s easy to say it, sure, but it really meant a lot to her to get back to her apartment and to see how much I care.

That’s really what it comes down to. Shipping boxes open up a whole world of gesture-making. We can say “happy birthday” and “merry Christmas” and “welcome back” like never before. We have the luxury of accumulating all this great stuff that we know would make our loved ones smile and save it for one day, when we can tuck it all in a box, and it send it their way. Then, the even cooler thing is when we get a text: Got the box! LOVED it!! THANKS and XOXO!

Packaging Tape, It never Gets Old

When I say that packaging tape never gets olds, I mean it. I mean it figuratively, and I mean it literally. Literally, packaging tape does not age. It doesn’t have a shelf life or an expiration date. You all know what I’m talking about. How many of you saw the same rolls of tape down in Dad’s workshop from kindergarten up until junior high, when you stopped going in there?

There were all sorts of weird tape; like drywall tape, that cross-hatched kind which seals the seams of drywall to make the wall look nice and smooth. The occasional roll of barricade tape that Dad picked up at a yard sale, or at least that’s what he told you. As an adult, you are pretty sure it has to do with some crazy experience down in Myrtle Beach but it’s probably best to not ask questions, especially when it comes to barricade tape. Or even just duct tape. For instance, there was this roll of brown duct tape down in my dad’s work shop for years.

Years and years. It was probably a gag gift he got at the wedding shower when he and my mom got married, like, As A Husband, You Can Never Have Enough Of This: When Your Honey Wants You To Fix The Faucet, Duct Tape, When Your Honey Wants You To Keep The Dog From Getting Outside, Duct Tape… Blah blah blah. They probably went on for hours with duct tape jokes, laughing all the way. Anyway, my brother and I brought it out one year when we were trying to make a rocket ship out of our Radio Flyer and wound up using the entire roll. It hadn’t deteriorated in the slightest. In fact, it was so intact that the wagon had sticky residue stripes all over up until the time we finally scrubbed it off for a garage sale about a decade later.

And, of course, figuratively speaking packaging tape does not get old. In this modern day and age, we are always going to need it. I mean, there is never going to be some new thing that wipes out the need for packaging tape. It’s not going to be staples, that’s for sure. Some sort of chemical compound would just be a pain in the butt. If you really think about it, packaging tape is going to be in the picture until the end of time…

Five Reasons to Buy Custom Shipping Boxes

Custom shipping boxes do not just need to be for shipping things. We refer to them as shipping boxes because that is a general term. If, in fact, you purchase your Custom shipping boxes from PackagingSupplies.com you will find boxes for any and all purposes. I will now present you with five basic reasons to buy your custom shipping boxes from PackagingSupplies.com.

Reason Number One: wholesale prices. You can buy bundles of these boxes much, much cheaper than any department store or retailer can hope to sell them at. I don’t know how it works this way, but it does. And that is a really good reason to by something from somewhere.

Reason Number Two: it is easy. Yes, I said easy. Not too much is easy these days. Or else it is so easy that you know something is wrong. However, ordering from PackagingSupplies.com is just plain easy, no strings attached. Part of it has to do with the fact that the products are very up front (I mean, you are either buying custom shipping boxes or you aren’t), but part of that has to do with the fact that you can navigate right where you are trying to go, all the way to the finish line. On top of that, the boxes are easy to assemble, and they make it easy to identify the contents with a write-on panel.

Reason Number Three: the variety. I never knew how intricate the world of custom shipping boxes was. Until I started going to PackagingSupplies.com. I mean, wow. Cardboard has gotten really intense these days. There are four main categories of boxes, and each of those offers many, many sizes (over one thousand!).

Reason Number Four: it’s secure. In a day and age when people are stealing identities left and right and going on African safaris with your credit card information, a secure site/company is definitely something you want to be looking for when it comes to doing business. I once did business with a moving company who openly admitted to scamming me and I couldn’t do anything about it because it would have cost more than it was worth to go to small claims court and it wasn’t protected by anything like the BBB or McAfee. In the end I was S.O.L. and they were richer for it. Or so they thought…

Reason Number Five: the package deal. Put it all together, and what do you get? As you can see, PackagingSupplies.com offers an easy, secure shopping experience with a large variety at wholesale prices. Now put that in your pipe and smoke it.

The World of Custom Shipping Boxes

Custom shipping boxes opened up the whole world for people. They really did. Do you remember how everything used to be wrapped up in newspaper? Or packaged in wooden crates with straw? Well, of course you don’t remember. I don’t either. That was a long time ago. But then cardboard came in! Pressed paper, if you will. In the 1700s suddenly people were walking around with delicate boxes containing their new hat or chocolate truffles.

It really started to change things. Because then corrugated cardboard was introduced. Obviously, using the one-layered pressed paper boxes for for anything other than a fashion statement or decadent bribe would be impossible. You probably couldn’t even put a single book in one of those things and expect it to hold up. So, in the 1800s, a particular genius came up with corrugated cardboard, which I’ve talked at length about before, but will give you a very brief overview of here: a piece of pressboard, a rippled piece of pressboard, and another piece of pressboard. All glued together, like a sandwich. And then folded to make a cube, and presto! From there, the world of custom shipping boxes was born.

After all, once a sturdy enough cardboard was made, people began to consider all of the uses they could get from it, and they began to daydream about the different styles of boxes they would need. Getting the right formula down was the hard part. Manipulating said formula into the most fitting combination was the fun part. The really fabulous thing is that you can find your custom shipping boxes at PackagingSupplies.com for wholesale prices. Even better than that: there’s no way you could click away from that website without having found exactly what you were looking for.

I know. I’ve seen just about every product they have, thousands and thousands of products, and there isn’t anything missing. Any size you could want; any style you could want. They even offer the exact same box in brown (called kraft), or in white for if you want a really professional appearance. I mean, who would have thought of that? I would probably just be mailing all my stuff off in a regular box, never thinking about the appearance. But PackagingSupplies.com is right!

If I mail something in a white box, it gives the impression that I am concerned with neatness, and cleanliness. That might sound totally ridiculous, but it’s really pretty true. Somehow it just is. It turns out that custom shipping boxes really is it’s kind of universe.

Packaging Tape

Packaging tape is a very interesting subject. You might think I’m just being ridiculous, but maybe you should hear me out. I mean, have you ever really talked about packaging tape? Like really sat down and had a heart to heart about it? Because it turns out that there’s a heck of a lot to talk about. If you just go to PackagingSupplies.com and look up packaging tape you will find a massive amount of options.

You may not think that seventeen options is a massive amount, but when you’re talking about something like packaging tape that really is. For instance, I had no idea that there even any options at all. Like maybe I knew that there was duct tape, and scotch tape, and that tan colored tape (what’s it called again?), but other than that, I mean, who knew? To rattle off a few: flatback tape, gummed tape, filament tape, black strapping tape. This is for real! I can’t make this stuff up. So then if you select these options, you can find out more about them. What is flatback tape? Well, flatback tape is a kind of packaging tape that is a kind of paper tape.

Packaging Tape

It can also be called paper tape. Which reminds me that the tan colored tape is called masking tape, which is a less sturdy version of flatback tape. Flatback tape is specifically designed to withstand extreme temperatures, and is completely easy to tear by hand since it is like paper. The deal with gummed tape is that it is pilfer proof, which apparently means that it makes it harder to break into your packages. You can get it non-fortified but you can also get it reinforced and even heavy duty reinforced (fiberglass yarn is woven into the tape). Mentioning yarn probably rang a bell for you.

You are probably remembering trying to rip a piece of tape that became a mess of sticky and string. And you probably about strangled your fingers at the same time. There is even a special kind of gummed tape for the box manufacturing industry, which is meant for the inner joints of the corrugated boxes. There is gummed tape made out of recycled material, which we call “eco friendly” in this day and age. There is the option to get your logo printed on the gummed tape, and they even come with fancy shmancy dispensers that have all sorts of bells and whistles.

See? I didn’t even get to the other kinds of packaging tape that I mentioned! Forget about the ones I didn’t even get a chance to list. This is how interested packaging tape can be.

The Many Uses of Bin Liners

I was a talking a little bit last time about how I was cleaning out my garage and found an old roll of bin liners. This was truly an amazing find, because I like to refer to bin liners as tools. I clarified last time that I say this because whenever I have something that needs a solution I often look to bin liners. And then I went on to explain the many sizes, and how they go from decently large to absolutely huge. I won’t go as in depth into the sizes again this time, because that doesn’t seem necessary, but you can check out PackagingSupplies.com and see for yourself. There’s like eighty sizes to choose from, give or take.

I also took a moment to explain how bin liners are better than glorified trash bags because they are gusseted, meaning extra material is sewn into the sides so that the liner can easily surround the entire bin, instead of just hanging down in the middle. Perhaps you should Google the concept (“gusseted”) if you need a better idea.

When I found that old roll of bin liners I immediately began to put them to use. First I raked my entire yard. I had been meaning to rake my yard anyway, but I don’t like leaving huge piles of leaves all over. Know what I mean? Some friends of mine have a dirt driveway and they always rake the piles all down the driveway and then set them on fire. I can’t do that because I don’t have a dirt driveway, and because most of my leaves are in the back. Even if I had a dirt driveway there is no way I would rake them all up to the front just to burn them.

The firepit is in the way far back of our yard, and so it would be the opposite end of the spectrum to try and get all of the leaves to the fire pit. A solution would be to leave piles all over my yard, but we all know that leaves don’t really completely break down over the winter, and I don’t want to have moguls all over my property. Clearly the bin liners were making a way for me. I stuffed those babies with leaves and the results were truly breathtaking. Not only was my lawn clean, but when the garbage men came later that week they saw an absolute monument waiting for them.

Bin Liners and Gussets

If you are British than you probably know what I’m talking about when I say the word “bin”. You know right off the bat that I’m referring to a trash can (which you would call rubbish). Therefore, by default, you would know that bin liners are the same thing as trash bags. Well, when I talk about bin liners in the industrial world I’m talking about bags that line bins in order to protect the product they hold. It’s a much larger scale.

Bin Liners That is the convenient thing about the English language. When you say “trash can” it can’t be confused with anything else. It doesn’t have to look like a trash can (some friends of mine use an old hamper, actually. It’s very retro). It might also be outright disguised. You might say, “Where is the trashcan” and whomever would show you, or direct you to it. If you were to say, “Where is the bin”, that leaves a lot of room open for interpretation. Bin for what? Bin for firewood. For sorting hardware. For separating toys. The word bin is far too general. “Trash can” is specific.

This way, when I start talking about bin liners at PackagingSupplies.com, you will know that I am not talking about trash bags (although they sell trash bags, too!). I’m talking about bin liners. Bins are giant boxes, and the bin liners are what go in them.

The other difference between bin liners and trash bags is that trash bags are two flat pieces of plastic sealed around the edges. A bin liner has a height, a depth, and a length. This is due to the gusseted sides. What is a gusseted side, you may ask? In this instance, a gusset is an extra piece of material sewn in to enlarge the item. For example, our clothes have gussets all in them.

Have you ever noticed that our pants aren’t just two pieces of cloth sewn together? Particularly in the crotch is that extra piece of material (the gusset) so that our butts can be accommodated. Otherwise we would all still be wearing dresses and skirts and wraps. And by all of us I mean all of us.

Since bin liners have to fit into large, square boxes they need gussets on the sides or they would be pointless. Thanks to the invention of gussets, we now have pants and bin liners.

Stretch Film Rolls, Part Two

Last time we talked about shrink wrap and food grade stretch film wrap. I mentioned that there were six categories under stretch film rolls at PackagingSupplies.com, so that leaves four more for us to go over.

Let’s see now…where were we?

Ah, yes. Poly sheeting. The scary stuff. I call it the scary stuff because it reminds me of that tv show about the serial killer who wrapped everything and everybody up in plastic, and this must have been the stuff he used. These are giant sheets of plastic. Like twelve feet wide and two hundred feet long. If you wouldn’t use them to protect your crime scene you would probably use them to protect your construction site. They even come in three different thicknesses, and in clear or black.

Moving on from the cold chills and heebie-jeebies, let’s enter the deliberately friendly world of gift basket film. This is still in the family of stretch film rolls because, even though it isn’t stretchy, it is still a film. It comes in nice crunchy sheets that you can use to wrap an entire gift basket up with, and tie with a nice big bow, or you can cut smaller pieces and use it to stuff the inside of gifts bags. You can go with clear, or colored (blue, lavender, or red).

Have you ever heard of poly tubing? This is my favorite member in the stretch film rolls family. It is what it sounds like: a tube of poly sheeting that comes on a roll. If you are doing a lot of sealing products but have varying sizes, you might want to consider poly tubing, because you can cut a length long enough for one t-shirt or you can cut a length long enough for twenty t-shirts. The standard poly tubing comes in multiple sizes and thickness, and you can even get the anti-static kind. If you are going to be working with poly tubing I would recommend not scrimping on the dispenser. You are much more likely to get a better seal and a cleaner look if you use it. PackagingSupplies.com provides these, and also the heat sealers.

Last, but certainly not least, is the most obvious type of stretch film rolls, which is the actual stretch film wrap. Machine grade, colored, small or large, the dispenser or the kind with the extended core to hold onto, there is no shortage of variety or option. Whatever you choose, don’t forget the stretch film cutter. Trying to cut this stuff with scissors is a giant pain in the batoot.