Thinking Outside The Box
Those of you that know me will know that I am a bit of an eco-warrior (except for my distinctly non-green car - hey, I feel guilty every time I drive it, does that count?). This means that things like this annoy me. I order a USB memory stick and a black ink cartridge from Amazon, asking them to group items into as few deliveries as possible, thus saving packaging. Yesterday morning a big box arrives with just the ink cartridge in, which could easily have gone in a tiny box or even an envelope.
If the USB stick arrives today in the same amount of packaging I am going to be very annoyed. I know it’s beginning to sound like a broken record in some people’s ears but we really should thing about ALL the resources WE are responsible for, not just the fuel we put in our cars or the jam jars we take to recycle.
P.S. Happy Birthday to Dad, 60 today! Thanks for being awesome.
Actually, to be fair, that box would be made from recycled materials, it’s 100% recyclable, it fold flat in the initial phase of it’s life so more volume of packing material can be transported at one time.
Also as they have only a few sized boxes to pack things in then it’s better for energy consumption because both the manufacturer and amazon don’t need to tool up for umpteen different sized boxes.There’s no point in having little boxes as they’re not economically viable, and require another set of tooling to produce, in one way, yes it’s a waste, but is it really? it;s not that much extra material, you end up with a more usable box because of the size and in the end it’s not much heavier than a smaller box would be.
It’s slightly silly, but makes more sense than having a warehouse full of boxes that are too small (after all amazon’s core business is, and always has been, books, which this box is ideally suited to)
They couldn’t send the product in an envelope as your cart would have been mutilated by the time it arrived.
March 27th, 2008 at 10:33 amI see your point Matt but I know for sure that I have had smaller boxes that this from Amazon before. Also, there is no excuse for sending two packages. Well, unless the items are coming from two separate locations.
March 27th, 2008 at 10:43 amWiggle were (are?) always the masters of this. Everything always arrived in absolutely ridiculous packaging. I had some handlebars turn up in a massive wheel-sized box once.
March 27th, 2008 at 2:57 pm