I’m Seeing Red Less These Days

The world has become less colorful. Your immediate thought might be I’m crazy when seeing the headlines churned out every day. So let me be more specific. There are fewer choices for colored paper.

I’ve supplied photocopies for a client over the course of 15 years. They are included with a food product and contain baking instructions. A different product had a different colored sheet. That was a strategy to help make sure the workers boxing the product could easily recognize what sheet to include.

We used to have 7-8 different colored sheets. Pink, red, blue, ivory, cream, goldenrod, canary yellow, and white, of course. But in the past several years, we’ve had to change colors for some products because the colors are no longer available. What happened?

Well, look out your door and you’ll see what happened. That blue van pulling up to your or a neighbor’s door with a package is the big reason. Paper mills that would create colored sheets of paper at various sizes and thicknesses sometimes shut down because private equity investors bought the mills, pulled out the profits, and shut them down. And many paper mills remaining open converted to producing boxes. All those shipping cartons used to speed delivery of online purchases to you.

I looked for some red paper recently for a cover to be used on a school directory I’m producing. But I couldn’t find a decent option. Two to three paper manufacturers that produced colored paper are no longer around. Yes, there are two dark red options from one well-known supplier but the type wouldn’t be readable on that darker red. The lighter red once commonplace is no longer produced.

Meanwhile, on my occasional online purchases I will often get products delivered in boxes three times larger than they need to be for what I bought. Kraft packing paper fills up the empty spaces in those cartons. It’s enough to make you see red. While looking at brown.