What is it with manufacturers, retailers, and others whose merchandise they wish you to buy? They advertise, market, pay people to do demographic work, pay others to “market display” their wares, and entice you to shell out your hard earned cash to purchase items you might not need---only to get them home and find you are unable to use them due to horrific safety packaging or insane labeling or annoying price tagging. You know what I mean.
Take that audio/video cable you bought to maximize the effect of your new home theater system; it takes you five minutes to hook up the cables but an hour to get them out of that cardboard and plastic prison they came enveloped in. When all your nails have been broken and all the available cardboard has been ripped apart, you hunt down the scissors, or box cutter to whale-away at the plastic. You might be lucky to free the cable before you cut your fingers on either the cutting implement or the sharp plastic edges.
And then there are those DVDs and CDs so beautifully gift-wrapped at Christmas or on birthdays. The celebratory wrapping is a snap to get through, but the shrink wrapping on that little plastic case, well, good grief, it takes a ‘jaws of life’ to extricate it from the shrink wrap. And, once that feat is accomplished, you have to get past the ‘stuck for life’ security tape on either end of the dang case. So, your fingernails are once again ripped to shreds and the movie and/or music is already outdated by the time the thing is out of its cellophane. New Age music is now required to calm the savage beast which has been unleashed; ummmm, ummmmm, ummmmm (it isn't helping.)
But my worst bugaboos are those nasty sticky labels placed on glass or ceramic pieces. These little devils are designed to tell the potential purchaser the ‘cost of the item’, who ‘designed the item’, the ‘discount to be taken’, or some other marketing message. Some very helpful sales person places these lovely little darlings right on the front of the glass, cup, picture, bowl, frame, or other decorative piece you just have to have for your house. The trouble is that sticky little monster is on there for good, defying laws of nature and chemistry. No amount of tugging, scraping, fingernail polish remover, or stuff manufactured to remove the ‘sticky stuff’ will budge the ‘goo’. I’ve had to return frames, artwork, and decorative pottery because the labels seem to be what the merchandiser was selling rather than the item to which the label was stuck.
HELLO!!!! What possible good does it do for these masterful merchandisers to craft such wonderful marketing campaigns and then sabotage the sales with packages and labels that diminish or negate the sale altogether? It is mindless marketing. Boo, Hiss, Bah-Humbug.
My “PIT” of the month rant.
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