There is no uniformity among the makers of plastic containers so that the lids of one container will fit a container made by a different company. Two plastic sandwich-size containers, to the untutored eye, look exactly the same. Yet the lid to one is, in some subtle way, the wrong size for the other.
Competition cannot explain this. It is pure chance which containers I buy the next time I shop. I'll probably end up with a third kind that doesn't match the other two. And I'm certainly not going to bring the lids of the containers I have at home with me. If I were that organized I wouldn't have this problem and wouldn't have time to write about it. I'd be spending hours obsessing over plastic containers, much as I am now.
What can explain this? The logical answer is that the containers are not made by different companies, but by the same corporation under different names. It's an evil corporate plot designed to make us buy more containers, and blame ourselves for not remembering which kind we already have. It's a devious monopoly designed to take advantage of the thousands, nay millions, of tiny ways a lid may differ from its accompanying bottom. Where are the anti-monopoly laws? Where is the Sherman Anti-Trust Act?
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