Packaging goods for sale is always subject to personal taste and there is always a lot of discussion in any industry, whether one packaging works better over another. DVD has seen its share of discussion both in public and behind the scenes, and the argument whether Amaray-style keep cases are to be preferred over Warner’s snapper cases will not be settled anytime soon  if ever. All that I know is that Amaray cases are more durable, replaceable and presentable, while at the same time, I have never had a snapper case with a loose disc inside that is begin scratched while on its way through the postal system. Be that as it may however, elaboration upon Amaray and snapper cases is not really the scope of this article. What I would like to touch upon today is the sticker-mania that has infested the DVD industry.
For little more than six months now, a bad practice has haunted DVD owners. So bad in fact that you have to seriously ask yourself “What are they thinking?”

Let me introduce you to the culprit, real quick. For a few years now, many casual consumer items, such as audio CDs and DVDs have had a label on their spine, which fulfills a number of purposes. The label carries the item’s UPC code so that no matter where else manufacturers decide to “hide” their bar code on the packaging, the clerk at the register, always knows where to find it. The label also carries the name of the item  the movie title in the case of DVDs  so that if discs are stacked on shelves, it is easier to identify them, especially since the elaborate spine printing of many DVDs makes it impossible to quickly scan over DVDs and pinpoint a certain title. Last, but not least, this sticker label is a protective device. It is a seal that indicates whether the item has been opened before, which gives customers the security to buy a brand-new item. It also prevents shoplifters from opening the case and taking out the contents.

the California sun for example where the label becomes brittle and the molten glue begins to penetrate every pore of the packaging and removal of such a spine label turns into a major undertaking with a 50% chance of damaging the actual packaging by your repeated scrape attempts to get a hold of the remaining pieces of the sticker, still firmly attached to the packaging. I have heard of cases where people went insane by trying to remove such a label from a CD case… Seriously though, I think most of us have gone through this experience and we all could live without it, right? So why would DVD manufacturers opt to actually put three of these culprits on a single case? Have they recently entered the business of disgruntling their customers? Not consciously so, I would suspect, but I fear it comes with the territory.

The reason can be quickly explained with a single word - Security. However, this is only the surface. To find the real truth we have to dig a little deeper, and I would like to put a name to the real culprit  Inability. Here is why. The publishers themselves have no real interest in stickering their product. They wouldn’t even be interested in shrink-wrapping it, because it costs additional money, doesn’t help selling the product and in the case of the label actually detracts from the aesthetics of the packaging. One could say it hampers the product.

However, there is another player in the field, and the player is the retailer. And some of them are pretty big. As most of you may have found out before, a few of them have actually quite some power. Enough power to dictate as a matter of fact, and the stickers are a direct result of that dictation. The Best Buy’s, Tower Video’s, Blockbuster’s and Hollywood Video’s of this world do have enough power to intimidate Hollywood studios, believe it or not. As we’ve seen recently with Blockbuster’s despicable attempt to muscle Universal into an unfavorable contract, many of these large retailers do have taken the reigns of this industry to some degree, and it shows. Products are not packaged to sell any more. They are packaged to satisfy corporate retail “requirements.”

disappear with it. While I don’t doubt for a second that this is true, I have to admit, that I don’t care a bit. Upon closer examination, the argument of theft is absolutely futile. Let’s cut to the chase of all this. The bottom line is that these retailers are simply incapable of getting a grip on their shoplifting customers and make the entire DVD community pay for it. To me this is like a cold medicine. It covers the symptoms but it doesn’t solve the actual problem. The solution to super-seal DVDs as a result of this is as hackneyed an approach as if your local grocery store decided to put their vegetables in locked glass cabinets.

Instead of undertaking an attempt to solve the real problem - which may require some expense on those retailers’ behalves, which is of course unacceptable - it is fixed with a few quick band aids - quite literally. The one who’s losing here is clearly the customer. All DVD owners are currently stuck with a Stickerphilia that is a direct result of retail executives who take shortcuts and prioritize these shortcuts over their customers’ satisfaction, which is ultimately the reason why these stores will never be able to turn me into one of their customers.

No matter what the reasons are for this procedure, I am sure there is a better solution. With some imagination and creative thoughts, every problem can be solved, and I am sure the problem of shoplifting can also be solved without forcing all DVD users to spend an inordinate amount of time peeling labels off their latest DVDs. One solution that immediately comes to mind is to leave super-stickering to those retailer who really feel they can’t manage their shoplifting problems any longer. But then again, that may just be too embarrassing, wouldn’t it? We’d rather plaster over it universally…

© 1997-2001 by “DVD Review”. All rights reserved.