I wonder if part of one of these shipments made it to Juarez, the city in Mexico right across from El Paso, TX and not too far from New Mexico. One day a truck full of flattened, new Atari game boxes appeared my street.
All the kids around the neighborhood started taking boxes from the truck and someone figured out you could toss the flat boxes like freesbies. We had tons of fun throwing these boxes around and it didn't occur to me how strange it was to find these empty, new boxes until many years later. I couldn't figure out how this truck-full of boxes was on our street. At the time Juarez was a major manufacturer of electronics and other stuff for the US so, in retrospect, it's possible the boxes actually originated from there.