Today I went into Staples to replenish printer paper (finally found 100% recycled!) and to look at price tags.
Wandering through the overstuffed store, I came across five different aisle-end displays of these "Poly Report Covers with Tang Fasteners." Forty-eight cents apiece. And, by golly, if you can find an ad for 'em elsewhere, we'll match that dirt-cheap price!
I'm trying to remember the last time I saw anything for forty-eight cents in an office supply store. The simplest pens run around $1.25; there was a perilously leaning, green cardboard display of bins filled with a giant variety of junk--each costing a buck; even the candy at the cash was eighty-nine cents a bar.
The sticky on the back of each of these (which, as we all know, can never be completely removed), naturally, said Made in China. Staples had to have ordered millions of them.
Will they sell? How many students or office/government workers submit reports, studies, essays, or whathaveyous in cheap poly covers like these with don't-dare-bend-them-more-than-once aluminum "tangs"? What were the factory conditions like where these originated? And how many eons does it take for every one of them to decompose? Does anybody care? Or is "We Won't Be Undersold" all that matters?
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