My parents are both in their early seventies. A while back I noticed that they leave the product info stickers on all purchases of things like TVs, appliances, etc. I’m talking about those plastic info stickers that are easily pulled off after purchase. The coffee maker they bought last year still has a sticker on it. There is still the product info sticker on the base of the flat screen they purchased two years ago.
Is this a generational thing? Or one more confusing thing my folks do?
If you don’t care about the looks of the thing, it doesn’t matter to leave it on. I’m guessing that’s their deal.
Have you ever asked them why?
My college roommate left the sticker on his TV so that everyone would know that he had a 33 inch hdtv. My arguments that anyone who would be impressed would be impressed without the sticker and that really, 33 inches is not that impressive anyway fell on deaf ears.
Summary: perhaps it’s a not so stealthy attempt at bragging?
I’m not what you’d call old (middle-aged, according to a recent thread), but this is one of my quirks.
As a child, I found a cassette in my parent’s collection that had a price sticker for an unbelievable low price and I stumbled upon the concept of inflation. After that, I left the price tags on my cassettes (and later, CDs) to see how prices changed over the years. It just became habit not to remove them. My nerdy little habit drove my friends crazy and they’d peel the tags off if they could (and that drove ME crazy - I considered it defacement of my property). I actually kept alphabetized lists of the music media I owned as a kid that included the prices (I didn’t play sports; guess you’ve got to fill in that time with something).
It has sort of extended to other things - I often (but not always) leave the energy efficiency stickers on whitegoods because I like being able to refer back to that information when replacing them. I also leave some of the clear protective stickers over shiny surfaces (eg, the clear plastic circle over the Dell logo on my laptop) because it keeps them looking new for longer but my partner is irritated beyond belief by it so I remove them for his sanity… if he mentions it.
Stealth bragging? Um, no. I’m just all about the collection and retention of useless data, and don’t give a thought to what the people around me think of it until the day they flip out and demand I remove a sticker, or do it themselves. Yes, there’s something very wrong with me, but hey! I’m harmless!
In a similar vein, what about the little stickers on crystal items like candlesticks and vases? Supposedly, leaving the little sticker that says “Poland” or “Waterford” or whatever on the item increases its value.
I don’t think it’s age; someone I worked with left the cloth tag on the outside of her coat! It was a huge tag sewn on to her sleeve. And some people left the little leather Coach tags on their purses; that was the first thing I took off. And once Coach started selling bags that were just patterned with giant Cs, I quit buying them.
My mom likes to leave the tags and stickers on things until she knows they are going to be working right and not need to be returned, because she thinks they won’t let you return it if it doesn’t have every little piece of packaging it came with. And sometimes she will leave stickers on if it has information she someday might possibly want to know, like the dimensions or the wattage. I peel them off for her!
As I get older I have less patience for doing things that don’t pay off. We just bought a new microwave and both my husband and I refuse to pull off the info sticker on it (and deal with the inevitable residual glue) because we know we’ll just replace this one in a year and have to do it all over again. Might as well just leave it there.
My SO likes to leave the tags on everything. I like to pull the tags off everything. I tell ya, we get along great. 
The first thing I did when I got my car is pull of the “BE VERY CAREFUL WITH CHILDREN” / carseat warning that was in bright fucking yellow on both of my sun visors. No kid small enough for a car seat, has ever or will ever ride in my car, and I don’t need them. He keeps them on in his car, and I just bite my lip and ignore them.
He also left the thin plastic cover on the bathroom scale, the one that goes over the readout. It doesn’t affect being able to read it, so I ignored it.
My parents don’t take off the clear screen protecting stickers! Every so often I can wow them by “fixing” their blurry camera or phone by taking a sticker off it.
When I worked retail years back we sold appliances. I had an irrate customer call to tell me he bought a washing machine from us, drove it home 45 minutes away, and when he opened the box it was the wrong color. He demanded we send a truck to his house with a new one and pick up the wrong one. And he wanted to be compensated for us wasting his time by giving him a discount.
I was somewhat confused since we only sold white washing machines.
Me: “Can I ask you what color you got?”
Customer: “Well, it’s mostly white but the top part is a light blue.”
(about a minute later after I stopped laughing)
Me: “Yes well that light blue you see is a protective film. You’re going to want to peel that off.”
Customer: “Just a second.”
(30 seconds later)
Customer: “Allrightthanks(click!)”