An economic boom in sticker sales has investors baffled while researchers point fingers at university students. Recently, laptop sticker companies have recognized that their largest consumer market is the university community. Why stickers? What are the reasons behind this growing industry?
Laptops, tablets and jumbo smart phones all have great potential in the classroom: many students use them to take class notes, while others use them to waste their tuition. Regardless, instructors are requesting that students do not bring them to class. We finally took advantage of a professor’s thumb-twiddling office hours to discover the real reason behind the laptop ban. Dr. Dontcare says, “I tell my class that some students may find it hard to concentrate in the midst of all the laptop tapping of note-taking. But the ban is for purely selfish reasons. I simply cannot manage to lecture while staring at 50 little billboards!”
As BuzzFeed quickly realized, students have an unhealthy obsession with collecting politically provocative or cutey-patooty stickers for their computers. Laptop stickers sits on the top of their “19 Things You Didn’t Know You Needed Until Right Now” list.
In this day and age, we are constantly bamboozled by the struggle of standing out in a sea of similarity. Every hyper-political student who owns a Mac feels the need to decorate them in a self-expressive way by ordering high-quality stickers made by independent artists and designers from around the world. Some say the laptop is just another platform to promote that perfectly eloquent Tinder bio we work so hard on.
We looked to our peers and found a sixth-year philosophy student nine credits away from graduating who was boycotting the library because of stickers. He told us, “I need to go to the library to research Playdough and Sucratities. But every time I go, I have the impulse to show people my stickers. I don’t have a laptop, so I started sticking them on books, and on librarian butts.” Afterwards, a librarian confirmed, “He’s not boycotting by choice. We don’t allow him in here anymore.”
So you might ask: why stickers? Well, how else can we let the world know we are purely and wholly young liberals? There are stickers for everyone: “My vagina, my rules,” “Don’t blame me, I voted for Bernie,” or the pride sticker, “Come out, come out, wherever you are.” Don’t be picky, just get sticky!
