he should have discovered that glasses with stems always, always are shipped upside-down. Or in other words with the wide mouth standing on the bottom of the shipping case to give the package strength and makes stacking possible, although still breakage is very common, inserted grid or no grid.
The foot on the stem is the most fragile part and the inventor took a logical decision to move that foot to the bottom. The stem in itself will not break easily by vertical (or even side-pressure) pressure and without the foot itself the product gets a sturdy feature for stacking shipping cases.