Liberty Intercept Blog

I am curious to know if anyone else suffers from a love/hate conflict with home improvement stores. I love visiting my local home improvement store, browsing all the terrific items, finding products to solve immediate problems and gathering ideas for my dreams of more atheistically pleasing convenience.  My aversion lies in that there was once a time, not so long ago, when a home improvement store visit cost a $35.00 minimum. Now it seems to be $85.00. In fact, today’s purchase of two bags of lime, three small types of fertilizer, two cans of ant guard with tax totaled $87.50. This post is not meant to be a complaint, but is a perception based on my own experiences as a home owner for 26 years. More importantly, this story is about the changes I have made so that I frequent these stores less. Of course, most homeowners know that goal is difficult because the more things accumulated in our homes, the more items require maintenance, repair, and replacement. I have made the decision to protect my items so they don’t fail.

Cause and effect, action - reaction, push - pull; however you want to delineate it, some sort of change will cause transformations, both favorable and detrimental. What brought this thought on, you ask?  I was executing my February home property inspection - a task surely effortless in this crisp 40 and 50 degree weather rather than in past years trouncing through feet of snow. This year’s winter weather has been a record breaker and unseasonably warm in New England. It feels as if we are living in Maryland or the Carolinas.

How refreshing! Hartford's Mayor, Pedro E. Segarra, told our group: “Hartford is fun.” Fun! He wasn’t complaining about the state of budgets and economic affairs within our glorious country, which is all that seems to be trumpeted today. It wasn’t “despite the economic shortfalls of federal allocation to states and cities...blah, blah, blah"; instead he proudly spoke of Hartford’s great and diverse restaurants rivaling the cuisine of other nearby cities like Boston, New York, and Providence. Hartford, CT, welcomes visitors with museums, luxury hotels, parks (Bushnell Park pictured), city walks, theaters, historical sites, free city transports, and “trained advisors” (essentially “security forces”), all within a short distance of the fairly new Connecticut Conference Center. “We will welcome you and your guest. All will feel safe and have fun enjoying our city... after a couple of days at the show, the local business owners will know your name,” claimed Mayor Segarra.

We had just finished our Intercept packaging training program and all the satisfied guests were headed back to their Friday afternoon routines, save one, Liberty’s Tennessee representative, Steve.  He had flown in from Nashville and was approaching the third evening of his stay. In his previous occupation, Steve was a Budweiser sales representative and can tell you anything you could possibly want to know about beer; okay I think you get it, Steve is fun.  Let’s go to Boston.  Elaine, Steve, and I jumped into the Volvo and drove directly to the best value in the City of Boston: the city-run parking garage under the Boston Common.

I was watching my beloved Patriots last Sunday and, at the risk of alienating football fans dedicated to other teams, I am continually impressed by Coach Bill Belichick’s methodology. Strange as it may seem, his methods are personal for me because of the barrier packaging we represent.  Belichick’s personnel system flies in the face of what is conventional today and this approach is similar to our Intercept Technology barrier packaging. Let me explain.

Liberty Packaging’s Recommended 6 Steps to Placement of Rust Inhibition Program

 1. Know that nature is fluid:  Where man’s understanding is derived from categorizing, nature is fluid and sometimes unpredictable. The atmosphere is ever changing.  Sure, in general, there are corrosive areas where it becomes more difficult for companies to ship and store, but that cannot always be predicted.
    Dramatic events such as:
    volcanos, tsunamis, earthquakes, wind storms, and hurricanes
    along with the understated variations such as:
    temperature changes, humidity, dew point changes, seasonal vegetation decay
    and man’s contributions to the atmospheric change with:
    emission releases and landfill placements
All can increase the amount of dust, soot, and corrosive gases in the atmosphere ready to rust your hard earned products. For this reason unanticipated problems may occur in areas where your company may have shipped previously without problems. If your product has value to you and your customer, prepare for the worst.

The weather has been unseasonably warm in New England recently, allowing us in this hardy group to participate in outdoor activities such as one of my favorites, hitting golf balls at the driving range. Because of surgery and the subsequent recovery, I haven’t been able to golf for the last few years, but with nice weather and a now-healthy body, it was great to swing the club at the ball again. Of course, for a rusty golfer, there were more misses than that crisp feeling of striking the ball cleanly.

I had the opportunity in the last few weeks to visit some factory floors. It is always thrilling for a curious man to view and hopefully participate in how things are made; the tools and equipment used, the noise of machine activity, laborers exerting, monitoring, being creative, deriving solutions, being productive; good old work fun. Because of the unique heavy duty barrier packaging we represent, Liberty Packaging has the opportunity to work with people at companies pursuing changes that help them become more environmentally safe while gaining cost savings. We help them by reviewing their processes to see if we can help things work better, easier, more efficiently. In my recent visits, these factory floors were busy and vibrant; very satisfying.

Within the business journals I read most days (chiefly, Industrial News and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce), all in the business community seem to agree that the recent Free Trade Agreements with South Korea, Columbia, and Panama will be a boon for the United States’ economy. This enthusiasm is easily recognized when industry-leading businesses seem genuinely excited about this news. Here are some past quotes from prominent U.S. industry CEOs:

We’re often asked: when considering Intercept Technology heavy duty flexible film barrier packaging for the storage and/or shipping of electronics, which product would be best?  Intercept barrier protection is currently used for all sorts of electronics such as complete equipment, circuit cards, printed wire boards, chassis and frames, even the most sensitive devices and chips.

Here are three Intercept materials that protect electronics: