The Curse of the Legally Required Label

Sometime in the last few years, the powers that regulate the import/export world decided that each product that is sold IN this country that is produced OUT of this country must bear a label to that effect. That, combined with the ascendancy of the bar code, has led to a lot of work for Joie de Vivre. We try to present everything nicely in this store, and to that effect, we remove any labels that we assume a customer would want to take off at home (like a big sticker with a bar code that says "Made in Thailand" on a tiny little plastic toy.) Last week we got an order for 200 small plastic kaleidoscopes from a department at U.Mass Boston. Each one arrived with a big label attached. We took them off - it was slow going - and the labels left a sticky residue that could only be banished through vigorous application of (commercial plug alert) - Goo-Gone. This took us hours and hours. Strictly speaking, we didn't have to do it - but we can't imagine our customer would have been too happy to have to do it themselves - and if they didn't do it, the items would have looked cheezy and felt sticky. This made us long for the good old days when this sort of labeling was not legally required. And another thought - we've been in business long enough to be able to say "in the good old days" - yikes !