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Amazon goes nuts with the packaging as they ship us nine cardboard boxes…packed in six more?!

Casey Baseel Oct 30, 2014
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A while back, we took a look at an odd online retailing episode when a Japanese customer ordered a single persimmon from Amazon Japan. Sure, it was weird enough to find out that Amazon sells produce, not to mention that you can purchase it in individual pieces. What really got our attention, though, was the comically oversized box it shipped in.

But just when we thought the company’s packaging couldn’t get any crazier, we received our most recent order from Amazon. What’d we order? Cardboard boxes. How’d they ship it? Inside six more cardboard boxes!

The RocketNews24 office can get a little cluttered sometimes, what with all of the PCs, cameras, and PaRappa the Rapper toasters that go into the making of our website’s articles. Too much clutter can make it hard to get work done, though, so we went on Amazon and ordered some cardboard boxes. Being the high rollers we are, we decided on some fancy ones with lids. They come three to a pack, and since we figured nine would get the job done, we ordered three sets.

Not long after we’d clicked to finalize our order, the Amazon deliveryman came knocking on our door. We’ve come to expect such speedy service from Amazon, but what we weren’t expecting was how they’d packaged our order.

For a company as high-tech as Amazon, you might imagine that all of their orders get boxed by highly advanced robots. There was no mistaking how this behemoth came into being, though. Some employee at the packing center took three rectangular boxes, lined them up, and taped them together by hand like some kind of paper-based Dr. Frankenstein.

Even the delivery guy was shocked. “I’ve been working at Amazon for a long time, but I’ve never seen anything like this!” he told us excitedly.

Now that we knew how rare it was, we couldn’t help but take a few pictures of it

Eventually, though, we had to open it up to get our order out. So we cut open the top, and what did we find?

More cardboard boxes!

Like we said, the cardboard boxes we’d ordered come in packs of three. The individual boxes aren’t shrink-wrapped together, though. Instead, they each ship inside of another box.

▼ They’re like the matryoshka dolls of packaging.

Look, Amazon, we like you a lot. We’re impressed by your cool elevators and outside-the-box, inside-the-goat methods of solving problems. We also appreciate the generosity of this “buy nine get six free” cardboard container deal, and we’re sure Mr. Sato is going to just love his new Maginot Line of box forts.

But maybe, just maybe, it’s time to think about cutting back on the amount of packaging you ship your products in.

▼ We could really go for some PaRappa toast right now, but we can’t make any because that’s now a load-bearing toaster.

Photos: RocketNews24
[ Read in Japanese ]