A nice side benefit for Amazon is that their customers will see the drab packaging only after buying the product. In contrast, customers browsing in the b&m stores of Amazon's competitors will take the less appealing packaging into account before buying.
I got the impression that the "drab packaging" options were only intended for distribution to internet resellers, not for all-purpose use.
Which I suspect is one of the reasons why this is slow to catch on. I've heard that one of the reasons why marketing & demo packaging ships in every box for goods like expensive electronics is that vendors don't know for sure which cardboard box the B&M retailer will open for display (as opposed to the dozens out the back), so they just make sure they're all the same. I bet a similar disincentive applies here, not to mention the extra inventory-tracking complexity if you suddenly have twice as many product variants.
i think the reason they don't see frustration free versions at target and walmart is they are probably using the same products in online retail they would ship to local stores. So having two product sets cuts down on their efficiency/economies of scale.
I wish all products on amazon were frustration free packaging.
There was a story a while back about the guy who invented/worked on the clamshell packaging getting frustrated, quitting, and starting a company that sold a special knife to open those packages. fwiw
Does this vary by region? I get no registration wall when I click through, and I haven't registered on nytimes.com. Just tried in another browser I never use, and in Chrome's incognito mode, to make sure I didn't accidentally have a login cookie saved. I'm in the US, fwiw.
One nice thing is that if you do get around to some sot of registration it seems to last a really long time. (Downside: You might post links not realizing you are only seeing something because you're signed in with some bogus account).
