Buried in cardboard spam

[awreed]

My wife has been buying shit pretty much nonstop via Amazon. This was her latest purchase:

A 3.7 quart air fryer. This thing has almost as much displacement as my Beetle and my Bus engines combined (3500cc vs 3600cc), and my wife said she was glad she didn't get the big one

This is the packaging that the thing came in:

Like a cardboard spam version of Russian nesting dolls. Why?
My recycle can holds approximately 3 million gallons (exaggerating, but only slightly), but still cannot keep up with this kind of corrugated paper explosion. To cope with my cardboard decadence, I've been dragging piles of cut up pieces to the mother-in-laws unoccupied house 20 miles away. If that fails to reduce the heap I'll be relegated to heaving crap over the fence into quadrants of the neighbors back yard that I'm sure they have never been in decades.

[heimlich]

Burn it in the BBQ pit. Take your wife's prime account away from her.
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[KTPhil]

I have noticed that sometimes Amazon ships a small item in a huge box. I can only surmise that a computer program is determining that by using a certain size, shipping is cheaper (small is not always cheaper if the sizes don't pack well in a pallet/container).

Maybe I am giving them too much credit though!

[iowegian]

I have a friend who sells cardboard boxes for a major supplier.
He must have a wonderful commission situation because he just retired at age 62 and bought a new house, a big-ass pickup, and already has booked a trip to Alaska, a Caribbean cruise, and a week in Grenada for this season. Oh, I forgot----he bought another house that he "rents" to his adult son.

[T Hollis]

Time to buy stock in "Trees" ...

[60ragtop]

It's not just Amazon that does this, it is almost any large on line seller.
_________________
Rick
Certified Mechanic by the State of Michigan in 1977
ASA certified in 1987
Certified Hunter Wheel Alignment Master Technician 1986

[vwracerdave]

Your wife's Amazon shopping spree is about to end. President Trump is now forcing legislation for all mail order companies to collect State & local sales taxes.
_________________
2017 Street Comp Champion - Thunder Valley Raceway Park - Noble, OK
2010 Sportsman ET Champion - Mid-America Dragway - Arkansas City, KS
1997 Sportsman ET Champion - Thunder Valley Raceway Park - Noble ,OK

[hotsam]

[TDCTDI]

[67ctbug]

[mark tucker]

so...does amazon have vw stuff

[KTPhil]

[KTPhil]

There is usually tax on anything I buy from Amazon. Few exceptions.

Amazon gets great shipping rates because of their volume of business. Anyone else with that volume would get the same deal.

I use Amazon because of fast shipping from Amazon Prime. I used to prefer local stores, and still do as long as they earn my business. It's not Amazon's pricing, but their service and ease of return that makes me a customer.

All too many local stores feel they have the privilege of poor customer service just because they are local. Sorry, a bad seller is a bad seller, whether local or far-flung. Neither get my business.

Good locals are preferred, next is Amazon Prime.

Costco gets my business for the same reason. No BS from Customer Service. They get it.

Most don't, and are disappearing. Good riddance.

[TDCTDI]

Eventually, you'll get to enjoy nothing but big box stores that only employ part time workers for minimum pay that can't afford to pay the going rates for housing & taxes, then as they "clutter up" the scenery, the people that still have money or those government pensions will get fed up supporting them & move on to communities with lower taxes & cheaper land. Those people will then vote for the same policies that made them want to escape from whence they came.

[hotsam]

The only retail store I enjoy shopping at is LLBean. The staff is knowledgeable, often older folks who know what they are talking about.

Their no-questions-asked return policy has been ruined by a-holes getting getting old crap at Goodwill and yard sales and returning it for cash, but they'll still take anything back with a receipt.

I was there once with my jacket that had a broken zipper. A little old lady took it out back and sewed a new zipper on it in about 20 minutes. No charge.
_________________
1968 Beetle

[OB Bus]

[KTPhil]

[Randy in Maine]

Recycled cardboard is worth about $140 a tons the last time I checked.

[KTPhil]

Meanwhile, back on topic... to clarify what I was driving at, it may be cheaper to ship boxes that fit into a whole pallet, rather than have a collection of odd sizes that don't fit together well.

I am imagining (perhaps too optimistically) that Amazon has some algorithms in its boxing machinery that account for most efficient packing of standard sizes. That one larger box might cost 10 cents more, but if the collection ships for a dollar less, then it's more efficient.

"Filling out the cube" with dead space may seem like a waste, but if no more can fit there anyway, then the "larger boxes that fit together well" may be cheaper to ship as a set than an oddball collection of smaller boxes.

I still find redundant packaging annoying. We recycle about 80% of what comes into the household (our trash pickup makes it easy), but the actual item packaging (not shipping packaging) often seems to be made of non-recyclable materials... odd plastics, stickers galore, weird foam without the recycle triangle... that seems to be more of a waste since it goes to a landfill.

What's interesting is there were news reports that Amazon may take over the actual shipping themselves, and not just with drones. Are they buying planes and trucks? Time will tell...

[T Hollis]