Sandwich bag has fake mold printed on it to discourage thieves

Concept design for an anti-theft sandwich bag. Anti-Theft Lunch Bag

Mark Frauenfelder is the founder of Boing Boing and the editor-in-chief of MAKE and Cool Tools. Twitter: @frauenfelder. Come and hear Mark speak at the ALA conference in Chicago on July 1.

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jfrancis

I predict we will see this again on November 15, 2009

http://www.boingboing.net/2009/11/15/anti-theft-lunch-bag.html
Duke Countu

That is fuckin’ brilliant
dainel

Just take a bite out of your sandwich before you go to work and stick the rest of it in the bag.
Tweeker

Coworkers eating your food? This sounds like a case for Mickey Finn.
Xander43

Next time I steal a sandwich, I’ll take it out of bag just to be sure.
grimc

LOTION FOR PISTOL

Nice!
dragonfrog

Using ground, raw, habanero peppers can have a nice long-term deterrent effect, and a high entertainment value.

I stayed a couple of months at a campsite/hostel where fridge looting was very pronounced. A fellow camper began leaving booby trapped food in the fridges. Every day or two, we’d run into him, and he would share his latest victory – someone ate the Nutella with sand, or drank the milk with urine.

Any long-term deterrent effect was only to benefit someone else though, as most of the people staying there were only in for a few nights before moving on to the next city.
anaglyph

When I was in film school, I used to write ‘Science Experiment’ on my milk carton. That always seemed to work.
FoetusNail

Once worked with an unknown thief who often took the leftover beer out of the frig on Friday; this was disappointing to the guys that worked overtime Saturday. Anyway the old boy I worked with passed away. Two of us deliver his tools to his wife. After unloading his stuff, she asks us if we would like some beer, adding, take all you want we never drink the stuff. Opening the garage frig revealed about three cases of various imports, we were a German company.
BuildUupBuzzKill

i hate walking around the office wondering wich one of these fucks ate my sanwich so i think it always comes down to managment or the people from the office below us, i like to pin shit on people i already hate, it makes my life easyer
Frank_in_Virginia

@10 And the decapitated head of the thief on a pole?
frankiez

GREAT!
Giovanni

Clever, except now won’t people throw it away?
gandalf23

While I would not steal said sandwich, if I ran across it in the company fridge I would toss it in the garbage bin. So it’s kinda a wash. Yes, it’s not eaten, but yes it is thrown away and is still unavailable for the owner to consume.
Brandon Abell

Just take a band-aid, make it look used, then stick it in your sandwich bag. Instant security system.
grimc

Infinitely better idea than the stackable fridge concept BB posted a couple days ago. Also reminds me of a William Gibson novel, where a character wrote “MILK EXPERIMENT” on the carton to scare away his roomates.
johnthelutheran

The main problem with this is I’d be grossed out by my own sandwich bag and would end up chucking the contents away out of paranoia…
Sekino

Should I understand from this article that sandwich theft is on the rise?
Gaudeamus

Well, if the sandwich bag is INSIDE one’s lunch bag it seems unlikely that a potential thief would throw it away since they’d then have thrown away something that was enclosed in something else.

It seems like the only answer these days is using a decoy sandwich with something sickening or really hot inside it so the perpetrator can be busted.
jso

#11 KMOSER

By the taste.
Sean Grimm

This really only works as a deterrent the one time, doesn’t it? Unless you eat secretly someone will see the fake bag, or you eating the sandwich. At which point you have to cop to it being a fake bag, or let everyone believe you are a freak that likes eating moldy-bread sandwiches.
Lotion For Pistol

Hark! Here is the quoted Milk Experiment from Blomg Blomg.

http://www.boingboing.net/2007/05/21/passive-aggressive-n.html
Giovanni

@SEKINO Indeed you should. When I started working at my current employ I bought a weeks worth of sandwhich making stuff, really good turkey and cheese and stuff. I put it in the fridge and went back 2 days later to make my first sandwhich and someone had eaten ALL OF IT!

The solution was a minifridge by my desk.
kmoser

Problem is, how do you tell the fake moldy sandwiches from the real moldy ones?
Sijay

#2: Yeah, and (at least where I work) I suspect more people would be prone to throwing out a sandwich in this bag than would have been prone to stealing one in a plain bag. So maybe more negative effect than just “a wash”.

Also, a nasty-looking bag doesn’t exactly improve my own lunch experience, you know? I could also prevent theft by bringing really unappetizing food, putting razor wire around my home’s windows, and preemptively ripping out my car’s CD player, but life’s more pleasant that I don’t.
ornith

Also doubles as a dieting tool!
neurolux

if you find your sandwich in said bag in the trash, then you know the thief dug into your paper bag to look at it. you can then dust the plastic bag for fingerprints.
- Antinous
  
  You know, a sex toy in the bag will have the same effect, but the sandwich probably won’t get tossed.