Dime Store Packaging

There's something about dime store packaging that, to me, means the product inside is more real. Regardless of what it actually is, I think that the packaging makes the product sort of honest. It may just be me.
It might also be--again, for me--the fact that it seems like an artifact. In today's world, the only artifacts we've got are things from the fifties, it seems like. Marketing has been around so long that anything that looks like it was marketed to our grandparents has a way of seeming more mystical than it by-all-rights should.
For example, I got a 'voodoo witch-doctor doll' in the mail from my grandmother a while back; a cardboard cutout of a poorly drawn and highly stylized 'witch doctor' that came in a plastic bag with a set of pins and some paper. And damn if I didn't think, at first, that the thing couldn't do some sort of magic.
It was the way the thing looked, I think. It pulled off the creepy dime-store legitimacy perfectly. Bright primary colors, inkwashed into a rough caricature of a person wearing a "voodoo" costume. It was exactly the sort of thing that you find in a goosebumps chapter book. I grew up reading that crap; maybe that's why I think dime-store stuff is neat.
And it's not just my eerie voodoo doll sent to me by my grandmother as a birthday present. I work on and off in a costume shop, and the stuff they sell there is the same sort of thing. It seems like a good innocent laugh up on the floor, but down in the basement the stacks and stacks of fake teeth and magic tricks take on a sort of sinister personality. But I totally eat that shit up. It's awesome.
The art is amazing, too. It's perfected minimalism: it shows exactly what it wants to show you, without going anywhere over the limits it's set for itself. The images boil down to the most minute set of symbols the designer could manage: usually a smiling face, the product, and the product's name. If it were translated, it would be: "Our product! This is our product! It makes you happy!"
Say what you will about marketing, but there's something of a haiku in packaging like that.
Maybe that's part of the magic of it. I don't know. Something to think about, I guess.