Does this mean they'll stop putting a box which says "Ready to Ship" inside another stupid cardboard box that's just sliiightly larger, just so they can show off their Amazon logo?
I just got a package like that yesterday. The article points out that's sometimes done for privacy & security (if a package is, for example, obviously a laptop it might be more likely to be stolen)
However, the package I received yesterday wouldn't have had these issues. The inner wasn't obviously something of steal-able value.
Random cheap things I've had stolen:
- old spice deoderant 6 pack
- 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.
I'm guessing there are (at least) two general classes of package thieves: Those who will steal any package, which would be the ones you've experiences. And those who steal expensive items more as crimes of opportunity. Package disguising really only helps with the later.
I received a monitor shipped recently in a box that had an extra layer of corner drop protection opposed to a normal simple cardboard box, and therefore it apparently didn’t need an extra layer of packaging.
“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.
Interesting problem but I think most situations are pretty simple.
I have received a bar of RAM in a box that could fit a small dog.
I applaude Amazon’s initiative to have manufacturers plan the shipping in the original packaging.
Maybe there are other factors, though? For example, I often get things from Amazon that are shipped in padded envelopes. The envelope then gets stuffed into my mailbox and bent. If it were a box, the mail carrier wouldn't try to put it in my mailbox because it wouldn't fit. So perhaps the packaging type selected statistically prevents broken RAM modules, even though it's too big if its purpose is to merely contain the RAM on a truck.
yeah I ordered a book that came with a cd from another market place, and the postman thought it fine to bend my envelope with my book a cd 90 degrees so it would fit in my mail box snapping my cd in the process.
Could it be the pickers are just not caring about the size of the boxes? They are supposed to be completing so many orders so little time that it's easier to just grab a big box they know is big enough while trying to get one more appropriately sized would take too much time.
I dunno. I ordered a gallon of oil for my car, and it came in a box that could easily hold 6 of these gallon containers. There was one plastic air pocket for packaging, which was basically flopping around in the box with the oil, and doing nothing. I would think that the oil container flying around the box would cause more damage to other packages than if they had packed it tightly.
This seems to be an internet meme, because it's repeated in every discussion on this topic but I never see any citation for it.
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?
This will improve with more automation and cut-to-fit boxes.
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.
The article describes attempts to avoid an outer box entirely in favor of making the product manufacturer’s existing box “ship-ready” by itself. But that box is usually decorated to show what is inside.
I was thinking the same. Implying that Amazon is at the forefront of solving this problem, when in fact they’re the main culprits (and have been for years).
To draw a superlative parallel, an article called "Tobacco Industry's Vanishing Cancer" that talks about how they are now studying how to stop cancer would be effectively the same, but a less subtle defense.
This starts to explain why any vinyl records I order from the UK/Europe come in a package that is insufficient to protect the record. And US orders come wrapped in layers of cardboard to protect from the USPS throwers.
Yeah, I ordered a drywall trowel from Amazon a while ago and it came in a plastic bag. Someone, somewhere dropped it and it bent the corner. I looked at returning it and the process seemed convoluted at best, so I just hammered out the corner until it was good enough to be functional again.
I tend not to order from Amazon much anymore, and this only strengthens my resolve to order from other retailers.
The same goes for any collectibles that you might order. I do collect things like Funko Pops and it's a coin toss whether it will show up in a plastic bag with the Funko box all smash or a cardboard box. Looks like Amazon will have to be taken off the list of places to buy.
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.
Bruised books have been an intermittent (and exasperating) problem with Amazon (and Borders and Barnes & Noble) from the beginning. I've always been surprised that they never managed to permanently sort out the packaging of their core product.
Yes, seems like the primary example of the boxed for shipment to a store vs e-commerce. In the store, the books came in a pallet/carton set, and they are all pristine. Breaking that pallet and tossing it in a box for another shipment is just guaranteed to damage it unless packed diligently.
I wish there was some sort of program to give the boxes back to amazon so they could reuse them or something. I guess the work of having to make sure they were clean would be too expensive.
One thing that concerns me is that the cardboard biodegrades, while the plastic bubble wrap envelopes I’ve been getting things in lately presumably does not. That’s a lot of plastic packaging waste that will end up in the oceans.
This is utter nonsense. From all I can say, Amazon has been moving away from recyclable / re-usable packaging and is pretty bad at optimization.
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...
Interesting that so much consumer product is still packaged for retail, even some brands that I imagine sell a vast majority online. retail packaging translates to online-friendly packaging, but the reserve seems likely to be less true.
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?
It is rather strange, isn't it? I usually auto back out once I see it's CNN. They still roll the freakin' insanely annoying video without any gesture from me, but somehow I didn't notice before I'd started reading. I may have lost a step tho...
ya I've got them blocked with a browser addon for that plus annoying headlines, I actually opened an incognito browser for this one and was pleasantly surprised.
Amazon sometimes gets things wrong when it comes to packaging but they're light years ahead of Wal-Mart when it comes to right size packaging. I've only ordered online from walmart maybe half a dozen times but each time the box was too big and the contents were all flopping around hitting each other. I haven't tried their store pickup yet but have been amazed at how poorly they've implemented box packing for delivery.
I generally like to bunch up my orders such that (hopefully) as much of my stuff as possible gets packed into the same box.
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)
I wish there was an option to bunch up the orders more to reduce packaging at a cost of greater shipping times or even some additional fees (could pitch those as carbon credits to reduce waste).
This was something Jet had encouraged really well.
Amazon Prime lets you choose a "Prime Day" and when you place an order, you can choose to have it be delivered on that day of the week.
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.
I recently ordered a nylon shoulder strap that came in a package about the size of a 2.5 inch hard drive. The box it came in was so huge I could barely get my arms around it, and there was probably 50 feet of bubble wrap inside.
I think they might be doing away with the paper bags with handles. I got a delivery this morning and all of the bags were some kind of thicker paper covered in ads, and they didn't have handles. I don't know how the new bags are environmentally, but they didn't tear nearly as much as the brown bags with handles.
They originally started with very heavy freezer bags and freezer packs or dry ice. I really like the paper and water bottles but I do wonder if the thick plastic bottle is actually less trash overall.
It's immediately usable as a cooling device and consumable as portable water.
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 took a tour of the Amazon FC in Fall River, Mass., last month. It stocks about 400,000 SKUs, all larger items (as I recall meaning at least one size of the item is more than 15") and they have a lot of irregular items - mops, rakes, window blinds, pool noodles, you name it.
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.
Amazon has been getting a lot better in this respect.
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.
That is strange. I bought a strip of four (five?) CR2032 lithium coin cells and they arrived in the plastic envelope but the distribution center is close enough to Davenport FL that almost everything comes by way of their own courier, which I have to whinge about because even though $DAY_JOB is half the distance to Davenport than $HOME almost nothing is next day to $DAY_JOB but everything is next day to $HOME. I suppose only Jeff knows why.
If the DC is close to the destination, then there is no real need for the scary warning stickers--AFAIK the lithium warnings are only required for air freight. I have experienced the grandparents problem as well, I thing the supposition that the box is sized to the warning label is likely correct.
I know for certain they're working on this, and pushing this boxing up the stack to suppliers.
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.
They mentioned SIOC as an option for sellers of any type of good but they positioned it as a way for sellers to save money ("we're not charging them for the box") and have better control over branding.
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?
No, generally the primary components of commodity parcel cardboard are biodegradable and non-toxic. AFAIK.
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.
Because plastic is fiddly to dispose of, and makes a mess when you just leave it lying around.
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.
Cardboard is a lot heavier so costs more to transport, plus of course its production is somewhat energy intensive. On a lifecycle basis does it consume more oil than a plastic envelope?
As always, part of the solution is to consume less. Better than paper OR plastic is not buying a thing that has been shipped from china to amazon to you.
Also the plastic lying in a landfill not decomposing is essentially sequestered carbon, isn't it? Which is better than burnt fuel sending the carbon into the atmosphere.
Cardboard is great! i use it to keep the weeds down, as it composts. Amazon's is much better ... any other box requires a very laborious removal of plastics and metals.
Plastic sitting in a landfill for a thousand years while it biodegrades is not harmful.
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.
TL;DR Amazon wants "Zero Packaging" which is their way of saying they want suppliers to pay for packaging, and every product should be manufactured for eCommerce consumption.
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.
I’m glad Amazon is reducing waste as a distributor. I also think Apple has done a great job over the years as a manufacturer. I was in retail from 2004-2007; I remember how the Apple boxes kept shrinking drastically. Other hardware followed suit, but the iPod, MacBook, and MacBook Pro seemed to be blazing the trail.
104 comments
[ 96.1 ms ] story [ 1434 ms ] threadHowever, 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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knapsack_problem
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.
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.
"The Business Of Amazon Shipping Boxes": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYh1KTfydvU
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.
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.
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...
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?
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYh1KTfydvU
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.
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.
https://www.andersonassociates.net/2018/frustration-free/
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?
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.
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.
...is this really a different company from the Suning (no ".com") department store?