Two cardboard inserts—one for the collar and another along the back. A piece of tissue paper. Two clear plastic inserts. Eight pins. Three dangling tags, two attached with plastic and the other with light yarn. Three peel-off stickers. An outer plastic bag. 22 components.
Oh, yes…I almost forgot. There was also a white dress shirt tucked away in there somewhere.
Is this sane? Is this rational? Is this compassionate? It took me the better part of ten minutes to get that stupid dress shirt out of its packaging. One pin was so adroitly hidden that I almost had to perform a CAT scan on the thing to discover its origin. The collar button was fastened, was furthermore secured with a pin, and was yet even more secured with a clear plastic thingie. This is over-compensation. This is making packaging mountains out of couture molehills.
And it’s not as though it’s all that good of a shirt; just your plain-jane Arrow with traditional fit and weirdly hard-to-iron fabric. That’s because it proudly proclaims itself as a no-iron shirt. But no-iron shirts always come out of the package wrinkled up like old pieces of Reynolds Wrap, and apart from sending them off to the cleaner’s, the only option is to try to iron all of that out. But no-iron shirts resist ironing. That’s what “no-iron” means, you know: not that the shirt doesn’t need ironing, but that the shirt can’t be ironed.
I propose a public moratorium on overly zealous shirt packaging. But how? Where to start? To what congressman do I write? What consumer watchdog agency do I induce to pounce? That longtime professional curmudgeon Andy Rooney had CBS for his pulpit. I have only Free Composition, and it’s a small, albeit bully, pulpit indeed.
Below I present Exhibit A: the flotsam and jetsam remaining after opening one dinky dress shirt.
