Amazon was once notorious for shipping items in comically oversized boxes, an e-commerce phenomenon that we blame on mysterious employees called the Stupid Shipping Gang. We don’t hear about over-packaging from Amazon that much anymore, perhaps because the Stupid Shipping Gang has all moved on to jobs packaging e-commerce orders at Sears.
At least, that’s how it looks based on reader Corey’s order of tools from Sears.
“The box was big enough that my daughter got in with them and they still had room for all the packing material,” Corey writes. His daughter is 12 years old, if you were wondering.
A former shipping manager contacted us a few years ago to explain how this happens.
“Having as few different sized boxes as possible is the name of the game,” the former gangster explained: using fewer box sizes means storing fewer box sizes and saving money by ordering larger quantities of the boxes you use most often.
Also, while it might seem counter-intuitive to regular people, in a commercial shipping operation, it might be cheaper to ship a larger box than a small one. How does that work?
“While you can fit more smaller boxes than larger boxes into a finite space,” our source explained, “sometimes a lot of those smaller boxes end up creating blank space through their odd dimensions, which makes it harder to fit in larger boxes.”
At least Corey has somewhere to stash his daughter, though.
by Laura Northrup via Consumerist