October 17, 2003

The Grand Parade of Suckass Packaging

So I bought the new OutKast album the other day. That's right, in between Belle & Sebastian and the Pet Shop Boys, I can actually go for a little funkiness now and then. But my enjoyment of the album was diminished before I ever heard it because the packaging sucked so bad.

Check it: you know those irritating stickers that go along the tops of CDs? The ones that have the name of the CD on them, so that you can read the title of the CD in the rack without having to spend the half a calorie of energy it would take to flip through the rack? Well, this CD had two of those. Because, you know, it's a double CD, and it's got pictures on both sides, so god only knows what direction Joe CD Retailer is going to decide to place it.

So that's irritating enough, because those things never come off as easy as they should, and they always make me feel like someone thought putting a freshness seal on my CDs would make me feel better about my purchase, but there is worse to come. There were also big promotional-type stickers on both sides of the case, blaring the title of the album, which is a fine thing to do, to slap a sticker on the cover of your CD touting its fine qualities and many radio-ready hits -- except could we put those stickers on the outside of the wrapper? Is that so hard?

So there are these two stickers on the CD, and of course they are attached with the stickiest adhesive known to man. So once I saw that they weren't going to come off easily, I might just have decided to leave them there. Except that decision was not mine to make, because while those huge extra-clingy stickers had been put on before the shrink-wrap, they had been put on after the top-and-bottom-of-the-CD stickers. And so peeling those off (which you kind of have to do if you want to listen to the CD) ripped the bottoms of the big-ass Adhesotron 3000 stickers, and so then there's this problem of aesthetics, having these half-ripped off stickers, so what else is one supposed to do but just try to rip off the rest of the stickers?

Well, that didn't work out very well, either, because now I have this massive sticky residue on both sides of the CD case that will not come up. My usual technique of rubbing that sort of thing off with my thumb (a tried-and-true technique born of many years of shopping at the used CD store that puts very big price stickers on their used CDs) just earned me a blister and failed to remove any adhesive. So now I've got this CD that I don't want to put next to any other CDs because I'm afraid it will stick to them, and, I mean, arrrrrgh.

How's the CD? Rocks. They really really need to stop doing spoken-word interludes, though.

Posted by Francis at 11:11 AM