It isn’t just holiday shoppers who are wound too tightly, it’s the gifts themselves as well, especially toys, reports Jeff Gammage in today’s Philadelphia Inquirer (“Toys’ Packaging can be a Real Pain”):

These days, children’s playthings don’t come nestled inside their containers -- they come grafted to them, immobilized by a torturer’s rack of wire, tape, thread and plastic lashing. […]

Today, dolls and action figures come bound like miniature Gullivers. It can take a parent 15 minutes or more to free them, and 15 minutes for every toy that follows.

Take Mattel’s My Scene Goes Hollywood Chelsea, a redhead dressed for a movie premiere. The doll and her two dozen accessories are held down by 20 pieces of tape, five wires, two lengths of stitching, three drops of glue, a couple of rubber clasps, a waist harness, assorted cardboard spacers and, not least, a plastic cord threaded through the back of Chelsea’s skull. (Which you know has got to hurt). [Hyperlink added.] […]

If a living, breathing child can be safely transported in a five-point restraint car seat, say peeved moms and dads, why does a doll need 20?

Answers: Long-distance shipping, shoplifting, and, naturally, marketing.

Here’s the real kicker from Grammage’s piece, surprising, and yet not:

[T]rying to open a toy is not just maddening but dangerous: More Americans are injured by packaging than are hurt in skateboard accidents -- 220,000 a year, according to government figures. People slice their hands on jagged plastic, pierce their fingers on wires, accidentally run themselves through with knives and screwdrivers.

Careful out there, people!

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