No more popping Bubble Wrap

SORRY to pop your bubble everyone. But Sealed Air Corp, the maker of Bubble Wrap, is about to take away your fun.

The new version looks like traditional Bubble Wrap, but won’t burst.

IT’S a sad day for poppers everywhere.

Sealed Air Corp, the maker of the original Bubble Wrap, is rolling out a new, ‘unpoppable’ version of its signature product, The Wall Street Journal reports. The new bubbles look like traditional Bubble Wrap, but won’t burst when pressure is applied.

Bubble Wrap was invented by Sealed Air Corp’s founders in 1957, but the patent expired in 1981, and is now widely manufactured. The new version, dubbed iBubble Wrap, is sold in flat plastic sheets that are filled using a custom-made pump sold separately by Sealed Air Corp for $US5000.

The original Bubble Wrap contains individually sealed pockets of air which make a satisfying popping noise when squeezed. iBubble Wrap is laid out in columns of connected air pockets, meaning air gets pushed into neighbouring bubbles.

While popping addicts will be devastated by the news, the North Carolina-based company is making the drastic change to appeal to space-conscious online retailers and revive its flagging business.

Traditional Bubble Wrap ships in large, pre-inflated rolls which are hard to ship and take up huge amounts of space. One roll of the new version uses roughly one-fiftieth of the space before it’s inflated, according to the WSJ.

Sealed Air Corp is desperate to boost the fortunes of its flagship product, which has lost market share to imitators in far-flung markets as a result of prohibitively expensive shipping costs.

Rob Thyen of Ozburn-Hessey Logistics LLC told the WSJ the logistics industry earns on average $US25 in revenue per square foot, so if a facility used 3000 square feet of space to store Bubble Wrap, it would lose $75,000 a year in potential revenue.

“Devastated that the bubble wrap company will not be making poppable wraps anymore,” wrote one fan on the Popping Bubble Wrap Facebook page, which has more than half a million followers.

“They were my go-to thing when stressed! Now what am I supposed to pop? Heartbroken.”