Amazon's Vanishing Cardboard Box
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A recent order though had two things of eye liner in it aaaaand... of course they ended up in their own very oversized box. (I did go back and make sure that part was also fulfilled by Amazon. My guess is that someone just thought it would be funny to ship a package that is 99.5% empty :D)
Not a perfect solution since sometimes orders come from different warehouses so are still packaged separately, but it's a pretty good way to combine orders into less packaging.
The cardboard boxes are easily recyclable or compostable. the plastic generally cannot be recycled but will sit in a landfill forever (at best).
The tape is probably the biggest issue, and more and more of that is becoming paper I think. I'd be interested to see packaging completely free of plastic.
Uncoated paper tends to disintegrate into safe mush, which allows you to dispose of it without much care, including by sticking it in a heap somewhere and forgetting about it. In a pinch, it also burns relatively cleanly, and doesn't gum up shredding/bundling equipment.
I prefer cardboard but I wonder if I ought not.
Spending a lot of energy to transport the much heavier cardboard (and the energy to transport the materials needed to recycle it, plus the recycling process energy) is.
Recycling is, for the most part (aluminum cans excepted) a feel-good exercise that is much more wasteful than putting something nontoxic into a landfill.
Also, the plastic envelopes are a lot easier for me to dispose of into a large bag; the cardboard I have to break down first, and that consumes a much, much, much, much more precious and scarce resource than landfill space, and one that is entirely non renewable: my life-seconds.
Of course everyone's seen the oversize boxes containing a relatively thimble-sized object, but I've pretty much had to stop buying books at Amazon - especially hardcovers for gifts. Nearly EVERY time, they just toss the book(s) in an oversize box, with zero or token padding. Of course the books arrive with the corners crunched and dust jacket torn. Usually not terribly, but more than enough that it is no longer a new book or suitable for a gift. They've gotten a lot of returns.
Very occasionally, rarely enough that it may be the book printers themselves doing it, I get a (usually paperback) book shrink-wrapped in to a larger cardboard, placed in a larger box. These arrive perfect every time, but obviously use more packaging & labor. Still, seems like less than 2-4x return/reship cycles trying to get a good one.
It just seems ironic that Amazon started out selling & shipping books, has become a technology leader in multiple fields, yet still cannot get it right how to ship a book.
Not to be pessimistic, but I would guess that the added cost of managing two SKUs for each product is not feasible for many smaller retailers, especially since the cost (putting in a new box) here is born by those further down the supply chain.
All that said, I've seen a lot more Amazon orders ship in plastic bags recently. Even the car seat I bought recently which is ship-ready without another layer. My guess there was that adding the plastic anonymized the purchase a bit, which might ward off thieves?
One of the most interesting parts of the tour is the "box machine" used to scan and make custom boxes for these odd-shaped items. We watched a worker take a bundle of tiki torches and quickly package them using the machine, and it seemed pretty efficient in terms of matching the size of the box to the size of the item.
However there must be some wierd corner cases. I ordered two lithium coin cells (about the size of a credit card), and they came as the sole item in a grossly oversized box (maybe 12x8x6?) with a strip of inflatable cushion things and a huge lithium ion battery warning sticker.
I couldn't help but wonder if the box was sized for the sticker and not the contents.
As of August 1st, Amazon started charging/fining their suppliers $2/unit if large items are not able to ship in their own packaging.
Meaning anything that is A) large, and B) unable to ship with UPS adding a label will cost suppliers an extra $2.
They call this program SIOC (ships in own container)
The fun part is that amazon does not accept price increases very easily. Especially not in this scenario... so suppliers either have to A) repackage their shit, B) eat the cost, C) find a partner to help distribute.
source: I'm an Amazon Consultant [1]. and we help brands figure this stuff out.
I am an Amazon seller myself (two brands) and I am interested in your comment about changing prices. I've done this in the past and don't recall getting any pushback. Is this something new, or is there a threshold you have to hit that triggers a rejection of a price increase?
What probably happened is the picker in the fulfillment center just had a larger box more readily available than a smaller box, so they took that one.
This means your box size may be to prevent breakage for another box.
It also doesn't seem to hold up to scrutiny - even if the initial packing of the vehicle holds everything in place, what happens once a few packages are removed?
For now, every human shipper cannot have access to an unlimited number of box sizes. It's possible to route orders to shipper lanes with the optimal box size stocked, but daily demand and product selection may not allow.
I can't comment on every single 'box is 10x the size of the product', but most likely boil down to the largest dimensional box size by order weight.
For example, given standard FedEx DIM Factor, it costs the same amount to ship an 8lb order in a 15x5x5 box as a 44x5x5 box.
If the shipping lane(s) w/ the optimal size box (15x5x5) are too busy to get the order out, nothing is lost by sending through a less busy lane in a box up to 44x5x5.
Handle paper bags instead of boxes, frozen water bottles instead of freezer packs to keep things cold, everything packed tightly but not bulging.
If you assume (sadly true) that most families probably use bottled water (we do for short trips where it's easier than filling up the reusable ones), this simply defers new purchases of bottled water.
Granted, it's promoting bottled water usage, but from a consumer point of view, I'd rather the frozen bottle of water than one MORE of those stay-kool packs.
I tend not to order from Amazon much anymore, and this only strengthens my resolve to order from other retailers.
Everything else, it's either USPS label or pick up at home.
Meaning, 12 customers return stuff, they put all 12 returns in the same box and send it in.
Paper padded envelope have moved recently to plastic ones (say, over the past 6 month). Now the shipping tag cannot be removed and the enveloppe cannot be reused. Also Carboard box move every now and then to non-descript box to highly customized and covered by advertisement ones.
On the optimization side, they are very, VERY, bad, how many times have I received a huge box with a tiny item...
However, the package I received yesterday wouldn't have had these issues. The inner wasn't obviously something of steal-able value.
I hope whoever took it didn't check their mirrors and crashed.
https://images.markets.businessinsider.com/image/5c140c7eb3c...
- listerine
- pepto bismol
- ibuprofen
- $20 azamax plant pesticide desperately needed while a houseplant was being destroyed by fungus gnats. Enough value I suppose but so random to steal.
- aquaphor (the tubes of stuff for dry lips)
- a box of pencils
I could honestly go on for much longer if I went through my purchase history. I live in a nice neighborhood in Boston and have a locked lobby where they drop off packages that I guess people tailgate into with high success. Or I suppose ringing the bell to a random apartment and saying "UPS" probably gets you buzzed in on most days.
“Ready to Ship” means that the pallet-unpack phase has concluded and no further unwrapping should occur. It does not mean “Safe to Ship” such that no further wrapping should occur. I wonder how the carriers are negotiating the minimum requirements for flat-drop versus corner-drop versus puncture-protection now that everyone’s trying to find ways to ship efficiently with less waste.
How much packaging waste is to permit shipping carriers to route packages with a 10% higher chance of “significant” collision, or with a 10% higher threshold for “significant” when measuring rate of collision? Both would be ways to fine-tune shipping costs without offering easy accountability to shippers or the public.
Unfortunately:
- Most manufacturers cannot afford dual stock (retail packaging and eCommerce packaging)
- Most manufacturers cannot afford employees onhand to repackage each eCommerce order
For now this hurts the consumer. Soon eCommerce packaging will be table stakes.
Their only purpose seems to be for transport-packing and carrying to my door. That's a lot of waste for a trip across town.
I live in Japan now and I've maybe only once had a domestic package arrive damaged, despite the much thinner cardboard used here, so it must be possible.
...is this really a different company from the Suning (no ".com") department store?
"The Business Of Amazon Shipping Boxes": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYh1KTfydvU
Is there a correlation between size and value?
It would make it easier to steal all your packages though, as they could fit more packages in their van/car/bike.