to be so hacked off with packaging on toys that I may never buy a new one again

[stumpywombat]

just spent the last 10 minutes getting all the bits of eye-poking hazard wire disentagled from around the wheels of a new toy bought for ds. That was after I wrestled open the box through layers of sticky tape and detached the see-through cover from the extra cardboard backing inside the box.

WHY do manufacturers package toys like this now? in my day it came in a box. end of. no need for a screwdriver for the battery compartment (don't think I owned anything with batteries anyway, until became the proud owner of a Sony Walkman, aged 12); no perspex cover, didn't look as though Spiderman had personally wired the whole thing together.

There are pictures on the box, I can see what the toy looks like, I can tell from the side of the box what it does. Drives me crazy cos it just seems so environmentally wasteful and pointless. Please enlighten me if there is a point to the packaging.

He's getting wooden spoons and keys from now on.

It p*sses me off so much too. We have to spend ages trying to get the toy out while DS is mithering like mad - and there's always one wire you forget or can't blooody get off

It's those bloody wires I can't stand, practically need pliers to get them off and they jag you to bits! I totally agree with you, total waste of packaging. I thought Easter Eggs were bad enough!!!

You also get stupid instruction leaflets too that treat you as if you are totally thick. DS's last toy was a stacking spinning thingy which came with instructions on how to switch the on/off button to on or off

That was the ONLY instruction. I mean, come on, do we need all that paper wasted to tell us that????!!!!!!!!!!!!

Plus the box is usually HUGE to compensate for packaging and toy inside looks like it's been made for an oompa-loompa

It's the stickers that get me.

You spend hours faffing around untangling wires, and then you have to put the sodding stickers on as well.........

Why are the over-pacakaged so much? It drives me wild

I do love secondhand / ebay toys that come ready assembled (and hopefully with the batteries in the sound effects pre-run down...)

I'm with you on this one! DDis 4 tomorrow and I am dreading the hours of searching through the tool kit trying to find the right thing just to get the new toy out of the box! Then you have to find your way into the battery compartments and have a complete range of batteries to hand cos they all use different ones. and then you have to try and sort out which bits are palstic, which are card and can they be separated and then try and stuff it into already-overflowing recycling boxes - arrgh!!!

It does appear dreadful and wasteful, I know, but technically it is less wasteful than chucking 25% of every consignment of toys because of damage in the shipping crate. It is a long and rough sea journey from China, and the packaging is there to protect the toy on that journey.

i once bought ds a little car to play with while we were out shopping i opened it only to find it was screwed to something in the box.
not only was he crying about all the shopping but also about the car we had bought but couldnt give him .grrr

I bought a wooden bead set from the Early Learning Centre a while back and it came in what I thought was a gorgeous box that looked like a printer's block ... I then discovered that because they'd made the depth of the box 1 cm too short ... you had to turn every square bead a certain way when you replaced it, in order to get the perspex cover back on!!! This took 20 mins or more ...

It was infuriating and I've never bought anything from there since.

Do these toy designers actually play with the products they create?

Arrrrgggghhhhhh!

Maybe we should start a campaign against it. A lot of places are using recycled materials for their packaging (mostly foodstuffs I'll admit) but why cant they simply put the stuff in a box of the right size and leave it at that. I think we should start a campaign, I vote to be leader.