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April 2, 2007 12:03 AM
Broken: Amazon packaging
Mike Berman points out:
Amazon.com used an enormous box just for sending me a small electric shaver - they filled the rest of the box with about 20 of those little air-sacs.
They could have just sent me the electric shaver in a smaller box, which would prevented them from wasting packaging material.
The electric shaver box looks like a normal shape. Rectangular.
They should at least have a somewhat smaller box.
Think that's bad? Check out what IBM did when I ordered a rack kit:
http://blog.fugue.net/2006/10/31/ordering-a-rack-kit-from-ibm/
If you save and re-use their boxes and air bags for your own shipping (like I do), then it's not broken - at least not for the person who *does* save stuff.
What's even more broken is that many of the major shippers (UPS, FedEx, et. al.) have started billing by package size in addition to weight. If the package falls under a certain density, you get billed for the amount of weight they COULD have shipped in that space instead. Meaning your 1 pound item shipped in a box packed like that could cost Amazon as much as shipping 5-10 pounds of actual merchandise, then they pass the additional cost on to you.
First: They could use all that nice protecting material and PUT THE PACKAGE IN THE CENTER.
Second: Maybe they use a large box to thwart thieves looking for something small to steal.
You know. I agree with you. However, there is a practical business reason why there is so much: it's much cheaper to do this packaging approach than to deal with the costs of a return for a damaged product. Trusted sources tell me this. Is it right from the environment and customer service point of view, probably not. But that's the why behind it.
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Previous: RealPlayer message center | Main | Next: Mattress pad washing instructions
On the other hand, it looks like that electric shaver is a weird shape. The more box sizes you want to make, the more complex and difficult-to-maintain your box manufacturing equipment becomes, and the more complex your shipping system becomes. Those air-sacs are specifically designed to be cheap, and involve basically no resources to make (a small amount of plastic.)
It's entirely possible that the money required to make better-fitting boxes would be far larger than the amount saved on shipping and packing.
(If you argue that money means resource consumption, keep in mind where the money goes - largely to the workers needed to make the added packing material, and those workers have to eat and live on their own. So, while it's not a direct one-to-one relationship, there's a definite connection between cost and material use.)
Posted by: ZorbaTHut at April 2, 2007 04:48 AM