We bought some new stuff at TJ Maxx and spent the rest of the afternoon in the living hell of price-sticker removal

I hate to sound like a codger – well, I don’t really hate it because it’s part of my charm – but WTF happened with price stickers during the last couple of decades?  Used to be, you’d go to a store and pick up something…maybe a new hammer, or a screwdriver, or like we did this afternoon, a couple of toilet plungers and a waste basket – and you’d go home and either the price stickers would come right off, or they’d be located somewhere like on the bottom of a waste basket so you didn’t have to remove them and you could just plonk the thing down on the floor and not worry about it.

I don’t know what the theory is behind the price stickers used by TJ Maxx and some other stores we’ve frequented as moving into the new house has progressed, but the damn things are attached to products with a glue powerful enough to cement the deck onto an aircraft carrier.  You start with a fingernail at a corner, of course, and sometimes the sticker fools you by peeling quite easily, but then you notice it’s only the bottom half that’s gone, and it came off along some kind of manufactured edge, like they wanted you to be able to remove only the bottom half of the sticker. 

But then you go after the top half and the corner won’t even come up, it’s stuck on there so completely.  After painfully bending back the tip of at least one fingernail and taking up the better part of five minutes, the thing starts to unpeel until it reaches the manufactured edge of a perfectly round section of the sticker, and there turn out to be three of the damn things, each harder to remove than the last as you progress across what has now become a wasteland of glue residue and bits of sticker and sections from which only the top level of the sticker came off, leaving a thin layer of half-peeled translucent sticker behind, and I dare you…I dare you…to attempt putting a fingernail to that shit.

During past attempts at sticker removal, I’ve tried taking a sharp knife, and once even the blade of a box cutter, to a sticker, figuring that it would be more efficient than my fingernail.  The results were not good.  The blades left scratches on the surface of the thing I had bought, in one case a set of nice ceramic plates, every one of which had one of the dastardly stickers applied to it in a highly visible location.  So I gave up on that strategy permanently and foraged the aisles of a hardware store until I came upon with the amazing product, Goof Off, advertised on its label as the “Pro-Strength Remover” that is guaranteed to “Work the 1st Time.”  

Saved!  I took the can home, pried open its little spout, squirted some on a paper towel and applied it to the detritus of sticker-glue left behind by yet another attempt at scraping the things off yet another product bought at yet another store apparently bound and determined to keep its price stickers on their products for eternity.

It worked…sort of.  Goof Off removed sticker glue, but it was stymied by those partial scraps of sticker where only the top layer came off, leaving a thin layer of paper and glue behind.  I tried soaking a cloth rag with the stuff and going after the scraps.  A little better.  Then I went back to the paper towel, gave it a good soaking, and scraping the sticker scraps with my fingernail protected by not one but two layers of soaked paper towel, the stuff came off.

Today was like a re-run of every sticker nightmare I’ve ever had with an entirely new wrinkle.  The base receptacle of a toilet brush was a plastic clamshell-like contraption, a nice shade of gray that matched the hand towels we had just picked up from another aisle at TJ Maxx.  I scraped most of the sticker off the clamshell and went for the Goof Off to finish the job.

It attacked the surface of the plastic like I was applying an acid wash, not removing the glue, but spreading it across the plastic clamshell and embedding it within its surface.  The shiny new gray toilet brush holder now had a gigantic swath of dull gray damage spread across the entire top half of the clamshell.

The price sticker was gone but scars were left on the battlefield that will remind me of this day every time I walk into the guest bathroom where the thing now resides, evidence of my defeat at the hands of whoever makes the decision to apply these price stickers with the Mystery Glue That Will Not Die.