Where have all the tea crates gone?


That was my thought just before going to bed last night. An odd one, I know, but somehow my brain had worked its way around to packaging.

I seem to remember that wooden crates of a standardised size, generically or accurately- my memory’s a little fuzzy- described as “tea crates”, used to be the default packaging medium for moves. Nowadays there are any number of plastic boxes or origami cardboard constructions available and it seems the old fashioned tea crate has been consigned to history. They have been relegated to collectors’ items and subjects of nostalgia tinged blog posts.

(A little digging revealed that you can still buy “tea crates“, but these are not the old fashioned, recycled kind. Rather, they are modern plywood boxes with a similar construction to their namesakes.)