Amazon’s Cardboard Conspiracy
Has anyone checked to see if a cardboard box manufacturing magnate is on the Amazon board of directors? That is the only way I can explain their packaging policy.
Boing Boing posted a story of ridiculous packaging from Amazon; 9 towel sets in 18 boxes.
I recently ordered a magnetic knife holder from Amazon. It kicks butt.
But the packaging, pictured at left, was just plain silly! The knife holder is basically a big chunk of stainless steel in a box. Yet, Amazon sent it in a box with about 20 of those little air cushions.
To package all this air, the box was easily 10x taller and 10x wider than the actual magnetic knife holders packaging! And the knife holder box wasn’t wrapped at all. It was simply floating free in the box.
What a total waste of cardboard (and little plastic balloons)!
September 8th, 2006 at 1:33 pm
My guess is that Amazon only has N different types of boxes (where N is probably approximately 6), and if you order something then they put it in the smallest box it will fit in. If it’s long and thin, then it goes in the smallest box of the appropriate length, which I bet is not very thin.
It’s probably more cost-effective for them to do it this way (since they surely get gazillions of standard boxes for real low per-unit costs) than to get a few custom boxes for the small fraction of their orders which don’t fit in the normal-proportioned boxes.
September 8th, 2006 at 2:06 pm
I just got an Apple wireless keyboard through them, and it came the same way, in a box that could’ve held 12 of them.
Luckily my cat likes attacking the chains of little plastic balloons.
September 14th, 2006 at 8:30 pm
The size of the box is kind of inconsequential until you figure out:
1) They had to pay more to ship it (dimensional weight)
2) Because it was bigger than it needed to be, maybe something else didn’t fit in the truck/plane/car, so additional fossil fuel had to be spent to get the item to you. Potentially several times during the package’s journey to your house.
It’s simply amazing how wasteful our society is.