In the September Harper's, Donovan Hohn has a story called "Through the open door: Searching for deadly toys in China's Pearl River Delta". Near the beginning, he writes:

Consider for a moment the aesthetics of packaging, the wrappings of enchantment, the clamshells and plastic blisters that serve as both miniature shop windows and seemingly sterile cocoons. Consider the little transparent sticker placed like a hermetic kiss across the cardboard flap. This box has never been opened, it is there to tell us, or even, more superstitiously, The contents herein have never been touched. Slit that seal with a fingernail and something changes. Magic escapes. Unused, untouched, the contents of that box are nonetheless no longer brand new. The difference between the new and the brand new is like the difference between youthfulness and chastity. Think of the components individually wrapped inside their little plastic sachets, the power cords crimped into perfect coils. Think of the nested loaves of Styrofoam—Styrofoam, which is quite possibly the cleanest, whitest, lightest, chastest substance chemists have ever confected. It is functional, no doubt, preventing breakage while minimizing shipping costs. But it is also symbolic. The sound that snug Styrofoam makes as you coax it from the cardboard box is a Pavlovian signal: the squeak of the new.

I just love that: the description and what he's described.