Crates and the law.
I'll talk about the solution first.
A year after I was born Petr Curtius and Ad Verschuren started a business making packaging for glasswares in their native Holland. It is as virtuously unexciting as any other corporate venture, taking its name from the first three letters of their surnames to give us 'Curver'.
Inspired eh?
Well, no, but functional and par for the course.
Their company moved into resin products, plastic boxes and bins as it grew, still in the putting things in containers business, making me think they had a good creative time in kindergarten, where fitting things in holes and boxes is an early move into size concepts. Along the way their company went through predictable corporate moves, including a takeover by Rubbermaid and a licensing deal with Disney. I'd be interested to know if having a Princess's picture on a pink and purple drawer stack made any difference whatsoever to the dishevelled state of any of our daughters' bedrooms. Probably not, princesses after all have servants to tidy their rooms, or it's the duty of the parent-slaves who brought them into the world without having been given prior permission.
One of my casual amusements in my jaunting days has been observing the habit of US
stage managers/sound-lighting people of storing cables, brackets, plugboards – the tangle of show-supporting miscellaneous kit – in milk crates. The threats of penalties for their using these for stuff other than milk when they were clearly owned by someone else whose name was often on the crate were many, varied, sometimes quite stiff, and always ignored.
Nobody in the venues seemed to know much about it, so I assumed it might be some quaint old law like that requiring London cabbies to keep a bale of hay in their taxies for their horses. Urban myth has it that taxi-drivers are still under this obligation, but in fact that law was tidied up and this obligation removed in 1976.
Not so the American and Australian laws governing the improper use of milk crates.
They're still very much in force, my idle wondering turned them up easily and quickly in a casual search.
Pennsylvalia, for example and, horrifyingly, the crate I most lusted after for the specificity of its threats and its beautiful bright red colour, still declares that a miscreant will be subject to a possible fine of $300 or 90 days in prison.
They're not kidding and it's per crate. And you could be done for handling, selling, buying… in short, if you’ve got it and it contains something other than its owners stock in trade (milk usually, certainly the most usefully sized containers outside the dairy) you could be in trouble.
The link to the PA law at the bottom here indicates they aren't just after crates either:
"6712. Use of carts, cases, trays, baskets, boxes and other containers.
"(a) General rule.--A person owning shopping carts, laundry carts or containers may adopt and use a name or mark on the carts or containers and may register the same pursuant to 54 Pa.C.S. Ch. 15 (relating to reusable marked articles and receptacles)."
But losses to farmers and the milk trade have been substantial enough that I wonder why they didn't introduce a deposit refund for crates like the one that was so successful with pop bottles. I bet an army of kids scavenging their neighbourhoods to boost their pocket money could recover no end of stuff.
For the rest of us boring old Curver is a safer bet. Venue owners take note: that obnoxious drunk you threw out last night has a retaliatory trick you might have overlooked: he could call down upon you the wrath of the dairy trade. My casual observations across the US and Europe lead me to bet there's a high chance that even firing blind in the dark backstage he could score a hit.
< https://www.legis.state.pa.us/WU01/LI/LI/CT/HTM/18/00.067.012.000..HTM>
