Manufacturing in the United States is enormous today, and items often need to be labeled, as do their packaging, so that the right items can be sorted and delivered to the right place, and at the right time. Otherwise, cardboard boxes or packaged goods may get mixed up or delivered late, or to the wrong place entirely. Bar codes can help with this, but another aspect to sorting and labeling items is the use of adhesive label tape, color coding stickers, custom adhesive labels, and more. Just why are adhesive label tape pieces and colored stickers so useful, and how many packages are there to sort and deliver on time and to the right place? As long as the right adhesive label tape applications and colored circle stickers and colored price stickers are in place, sorting can be made easy and fast.
Packaging and Industry
Many billions of items in the United States will be delivered to and from such places as the manufacturer, warehouses, and a retailer’s stock rooms and shelves, and along the way, packages and items will need the correct adhesive label tape and more to keep everything sorted and going in the right direction. What is more, tape can be used as a security measure on packages for valuable goods; tape that is damaged, cut, or torn off can indicated taht the package was tampered with, and anyone receiving it can contact the correct authorities to deal with this problem. On an average day, UPS will handle 15.8 million packages, and globally, around 65 billion parcels were shipped in the year 2016 alone, and keeping all these different packages coordinated is not easy if custom adhesive labels and other stickers are not used to keep everything sorted. This can apply to anything from fruits and vegetables to books, machine parts in packaging, and office supplies, and stickers will keep track of due date of delivery, category, price, origins of the item, and more. This provides a quick and easy visual cue for any worker who is loading, transporting, or unloading various goods. This means that color coding stickers and more can appeal to the human mind’s affinity for pattern and recognition. For example, in the year 2002, researchers found out that subjects tended to perform 10% better on standard pattern recognition tests when the tests were done in color instead of black and white.
Stickers at the Retailer
The use of adhesive label tape and color-coded stickers is useful not just for the crews who receive and sort these packages, but also for advertising prices and items to customers. Businesses have often researched the psychology and behavior of customers who visit brick and mortar stores to shop, and this has resulted in a number of established techniques. One of them is to use bright and warm colors on packaging and price labels alike. A sale, discount, or other deal can be hyped when it is presented in colors like orange, yellow, and red, and this can apply a sense of excitement and urgency to the item and its sale, and customers may make this association deep down without even realizing it. New, lower prices can draw a customer’s attention from a combination of signs, the packaging’s own aesthetics, the colorful sticker, and of course, the numbers themselves.
Such stickers can also be useful for when stores rapidly adjust the price of items, and new stickers can easily be applied over older ones, or onto signs or directly onto packaging, again using warm colors to draw attention to themselves. If a particular item goes on sale, store associates can apply stickers with the new prices on all the packages, or over old stickers or on a sign that advertises the item. More stickers can be applied at a moment’s notice, and this can be relevant in a time of year when sales and discounts are common, such as around Thanksgiving or the winter holidays.
The staff members at a book store will need to rapidly sort through many different books in their inventory, and when books first arrive (often in shrink wrap), it is important to put books in the right area based on genre, author, newness, or sale, and colored stickers can help, making the work smoother and faster.