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Comment by manicennui | Hacker News Reader

If you care about the condition of books you buy, don't buy from Amazon. They'll throw a $100+ hardcover in a lightly padded envelope and chuck it around. Or they'll put it in a box with some other random item and a few inflatable shipping bags, but not enough to keep things from shifting around freely.

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I've stopped buying books from Amazon as _every_single_one_ comes with the corners dinged, the covers scratched, and often times bent in half one way or the other.

If I happen to want a self-published-printed-by-amazon book (ie. not available at any other store), I'll really think twice about it, as the quality is probably total crap. The last one I got had screenshots that were all unreadable (and the main content was mostly in the screenshots, without explaining text otherwise), and looked like it was printed at about 15 dpi.

OOTH, I've never had problems with BN or Bookshop.

Their packing has gotten comically bad, particularly for sensitively items like books and such. I've greatly reduced my Amazon buying over the years due to issues with damaged items, and lately, Amazon is getting more aggressive about discouraging returns. But I'm not going to pay $30+ for a new hardcover that comes damaged and covered with dirt and grime.

I ordered a gallon of urethane and they just stuck it in a comically large box with no padding. Miracle it didn't break all the way open in shipping.

Edit: They also tried to send a replacement, marked it as undeliverable, and charged me for it. I don't think Amazon was always this bad.

It seems like all shipping companies have gotten comically bad in the past year or two. This past summer I mailed boxes to seven family members via USPS. Only 3 of 7 boxes made it to their destinations intact. Three were delivered but destroyed, crushed, like either someone drove over them with a truck or literally jumped up and down on them several times, and one just disappeared. UPS has also delivered to me several completely destroyed packages in the past few months, also looked like they were driven over by trucks.

I've been ordering stuff online for two decades and "badly packed stuff" is nothing new, I assure you.

Same here, noticed a lot of stuff from Amazon lately arrived in a condition as if somebody used it as a piñata. Fortunately, for the stuff I ordered it didn't really ruin anything except the external packaging, which I didn't need anyway, but I hate to think what it'd done to a book...

Ordered a new cable modem and received it today.

They put the shipping label ON the retail packaging. No box! This is FBA. Of course it was scuffed and scraped all to hell.

This is an option at checkout, they default to “minimize packaging, use the box it comes in”, but you can opt out.

Personally i think this is a great move that reduces overpackaging and its associated environmental impact

> Personally i think this is a great move that reduces overpackaging and its associated environmental impact

I've chosen to do Amazon's Amazon Day Delivery service several times, but I have stopped doing it, basically without a choice. It's guaranteed to worsen the packaging. They just throw everything in a big enough (normally bigger than it needs to be) box and put a piece of paper in there and call it good. It's just unacceptable. Plus, their incentives for doing so are not good, often non-existent, and you are still paying the full Prime price, which keeps increasing.

In theory, the boxes that items come in - especially electronics - should be good enough for shipping, they're often full of padding and the exterior is glossy / lightly water resistant; I've ordered a few items that came without a box like that, it's fine, the packaging has no value. It's more that retailers can be anal about box quality because that's how items were sold at one point.

100% agree. Just about every book I've bought from amazon has arrived severely damaged due to crap packaging. I wanted to buy a really nice limited release folio recently, but for some reason the printer only sold it through Amazon. Why would you sell your $200 art book through a company that guarantees 90% of them will be trashed? I emailed the printer, they confirmed the books were only available through amazon, I bought one, and returned it because it looked like it had been thrown down a flight of stairs.

Aren't they also widely known to co-mingle with cheap counterfeit books as well?

Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Borders many years ago did use packaging that completely protected books from damage. I guess they found there are enough people who really don't care, so that the sellers don't have to care either.

I've stopped buying from Amazon, period.

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