The Wired Age

Yesterday our 4-year-old daughter received a baby doll from her grandmother, a replacement for one that our (former) dog ate. Not for the first time, I marveled at what a pain in the ass it was to extricate the doll and all her accessories from the box: Everything was wired down, taped, and/or wrapped in plastic, and the box itself was difficult to open and disassemble (which was necessary to remove the contents). The process involved an unreasonable amount of cutting, pulling, untwisting, tearing, yanking, and cursing. Since I've encountered this problem many times before and never really understood why toy packaging is so much more complex and consumer-unfriendly today than it used to be, I did a little research and found a 2005 Philadelphia Inquirer article that purports to explain it all. Unfortunately, the story is locked up in the paper's pay-per-view archive (you can also find it on Nexis), but here's a summary.

Toy manufacturers recognize that they're pissing off their customers, not to mention spending a lot of money on all those extra bits of wire, tape, and plastic. But those costs are outweighed by a couple advantages:

1) The restraints keep toys not only intact but in place as they journey from China and other far-off places, so they can advertise themselves through the see-through fronts of their boxes when they reach stores.

2) The packaging that frustrates buyers also frustrates parents looking to replace lost, broken, or missing toy parts on the cheap.

I don't know whether parents have become more larcenous since I was a kid, but see-through boxes certainly are more common, as are long-distance journeys for toys, few of which are manufactured in the U.S. anymore. I could play up another factor mentioned by the Inquirer—"shipping and security regulations set by distributors and governments"—but I prefer to make the point that no one ever said the market was literally miraculous, giving everyone exactly what he wants at a price he likes. Even when there's plenty of competition, consumers still have to make tradeoffs. In this case, they are getting inexpensive toys they can examine in the store without opening the box, but at the cost of additional annoyance when they get the toy home. I will try to remember that the next time I'm unscrewing a plastic restraining strap or getting out the garden shears to cut through a rigid plastic bubble.