The data plate at the bottom of the the leaf bags we get from the town seems intended to set expectations at a certain level:
Which is immediately belied by the situation at the other end of the bag:
OK, it’s just a typo that could happen to anyone, but it first appeared last year and seems to be continuing. Possibly the Town of Poughkeepsie bought a lot of bags and we’re working through the stack.
However, the built-in gashes along the sides of some bags were a new feature this year:
Perhaps a misalignment in the folder or stacker:
Enough bags had slices, perhaps four in some ten-packs, to justify keeping the packing tape dispenser at hand while we were shredding up a storm:
Which frosted Mary pretty severely, as she recycles the used bags as garden path pavers after distributing their contents as mulch, so she’ll be stripping plenty of tape next year.
Although I’m not privy to the Town’s dealings, Dano’s chart suggests the bags cost about 40¢ in truckload lots, about as much as Lowe’s charges for similar bags in retail five-packs. Surprisingly, you can also buy the same Lowe’s bags from Amazon for a lot more, suggesting some folks live much further from a Lowe’s than we do.
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 
Lowe’s thought about building a store in the local city, but after 8 Summers of Recovery(tm), decided that they’d wait until conditions got better. They let the option on the building site laps, so…
OTOH, we get pine needles by the truckload, so when the weather cooperates, we work on our carbon footprint. Not so far this year; the burn window opened, but the rain and snow storms entered first. A white Thanksgiving wasn’t part of the autumn planning, but that’s what’s on the ground.
Our neighbor’s pines buried the driveway in needles, so Mary has enough mulch for all her acid-needy plants. Man, those things were a mess …
And I am so glad to not be downwind of Lake Erie at the moment!
those slits could be down to overenthusiastic/careless use of a box knife in the removal of outer packaging. A while back, on a grocery procurement expedition, I noticed a lot of butter had slits in the wrapping. I discovered why when when I saw how the guy was opening the shipping cartons. I now choose my butter from the middle of the box…..
Poking around inside the remaining ten-pack shows the slashes are on folded-together sides never seeing the light of day until we unfold the bag beside the shredder. There’s no way to get a blade in there, not even deliberately, so the gashes really happened during production.
I’m sure bags fly between the folder and the pack binder at the speed of heat, but QC is all about seeing things before the customer finds out.
Those gashes look like they’re at stress points in the folding. The fiber reinforcement partially bridging the split makes me think it’s not so much a cut, but rather a failure.
I’d be curious if
a) Are they present while still in the folded position?
b1) Did they start OK, then split after some time in the box?
b2) Do they split while unfolding?
Not much chance of an answer to ‘b1’ unless a fresh batch comes around.
Having just looked, the slices are definitely inherent vice: inside the folded parts and durable enough to stay that way. Some start as a scratch, go deeper into the paper until they break through as a cut, then ease back out again. It really does look like a sharp edge just barely touching the paper as it sails by, but they must have had one at each corner of the to-be-folded bag.
The machinery surely has been running perfectly for decades with zero electronics!
I bought some “genuine Gates silicone heater hose” from that large internet bookseller. Arrived in an apparently-genuine box, with the hose itself marked along it “SILICONE HEARTER HOSE MADE IN VIETNAM 4Q21”.
So I did what any [un]reasonable person would do and called up their Applications Engineering department.
And a perfectly lovely woman answered the phone, listened to my question, said “Hmm, that doesn’t sound right, we definitely know how to spell, and the date code is wrong and it should say MADE IN USA. Can you email me some photos?” and gave me her email address.
And replied back to me a day later saying she’d checked with engineering and in fact they had made a batch in Vietnam that year, and had in fact misspelled “heater”, and the hose should be fine to use.
None of that story was what I expected…
Now, that’s customer service!
But, yeah, I could see a “hearter hose” escaping from a surgical supply factory.