Plastic packaging is designed to be tough – it keeps things securely in place on store shelves and helps prevent theft.

“the problem is, when you get these items home or you try to give them as gifts, how do you open them? You can’t rip the package open. So the only way to do it, is to take a pair of scissors and start cutting away,” says Stacy Genovese, Engineering Director, Good Housekeeping Institute.

And that’s when the battle begins because this is not an easy task. So the Good Housekeeping Institute looked at some new gadgets aimed at making all this easier. The Pyranna Plastic Package Opener’s circular blade worked almost 40 percent faster than scissors in Good Housekeeping’s tests. You simply clamp it along the edge of a package and pull.

The EZ-CD/DVD Combo Opener is a different product that makes quick work on packaged CD’s and DVD’s. “You just put it along the spine of either the CD or the DVD and when you press down, a little blade is exposed and just run it along the spine," says Genovese. "It cuts through the cellophane and is easy to open."

An interesting thing happened when Good Housekeeping was testing this product. The original instructions that came with the gadget were wrong. "So after our testing, we called the company and they corrected the instructions to get rid of the error,” says Genovese.

Why do companies make plastic packages so hard to open? Partly, they want to discourage shoplifting, to make it harder for people to steal items from inside the packages. But they also want the items to be visible to consumers while at the same time avoid getting broken during shipping.

To learn more, check out the December issue of Good Housekeeping or visit www.goodhousekeeping.com.