At the risk of sounding like a cranky guy, I have to say that I am completely baffled by people who buy consumer electronics and then don’t peel off the product feature stickers. You know what I’m talking about, they used to only be on “display” or “demo” units at the store, but now for some reason we all get to enjoy stickers all over our TVs, DVD players, stereos, computers, and cameras that tell you about their megapixel capabilities, their format compatibility, standards compliance, partner brand logos, and on and on.
It’s annoying that companies now routinely put these stickers on our products at the factory (sometimes with alarming results: when I was researching LCDTV systems I really liked a particular Phillips unit, except for the customer complaints that they couldn’t get the stickers off the TV screen itself without damaging the TV!) but it’s downright weird how many people leave the stickers on once they start using the product.
I see this most overtly with digital cameras, the deck-of-cards-size ubiquitous gadgets that everyone in a tourist locale totes around like a “get into paradise free” card. I know, I have one too, a slick little Sony DSC-W90 digital camera.
The difference between me and the rest of these folk (oh how I long to just be crass and write “rest of these chumps”, but I resist!) is that I peeled the bloody sticker off my camera as soon as I pulled it out of the box. 🙂
If Sony would like me to advertise their camera and help them sell a few, we can definitely talk, but in the meantime I see this in the same category as other annoyingly pervasive advertising such as car dealer license frames and “Intel inside” stickers on PC laptops: bad news but something we’ve seemingly given up fighting and complaining about.
Look around you at your own gadgets. Do you have product feature stickers on your stereo? Your TV? Your laptop? Your camera?
If so, why haven’t you taken them off?
Kudos to Apple too, for not utilizing these marketing stickers on their products. From laptops to iPhones, I don’t recall ever seeing a single feature sticker on any of their products. Everyone else? Shame, shame! 🙂
it’s so walmart employees can open any box, stick that security cord on the device, and leave it on the display rack gathering dust and fingerprints. Yokels walk up and instead of pretending to know what they’re talking about can start spouting off marketing-speak.
Three dimensional ones are the best; I had this cardboard triangle glued to the top of my DVD player like some white-trash place setting.
but then I purposely left one on my computer to remind me of a capability it has … that I might eventually use someday …
at least most of those stickers peel off easily – it’s the price stickers that drive me nuts – the ones that are scored into tiny pieces and are hell to remove …
I like my little laptop stickers- that way I remember what I have since I am not a total geek….like some~:-)