Slashdot Mirror
Excessive Tech Packaging?
fraew wonders: "I just received a Microsoft Partner Program package in the usual MSDN sized box (34cm x 25cm x 11cm) that contained a single A5 piece of paper. Nothing more. Previously I've had RAM DIMMs and PCI cards double-boxed in boxes that approached the size of a computer case, so what is the worst example of excessive tech packaging you've received?"
Paper is a friggin' waste to recycle. It's biodegradable for one. The tree's used to make it in the U.S. all come from tree farms. These trees are grown specifically for this purpose, so no one is running into virgin forests cutting down all the trees for paper. There does exist opposing research for both sides on the topic of set asides and the increased cost to consumers for packaging. I think the cost difference is negligible and definitely worth the process of forest conservation. On the topic of pollution, no one really talks about it. It's kinda like a dirty secret. To recycle paper you need to put it through basically the same process as making it - which is horrible for the environment. So, instead of making an inferior product that causes the same amount of environmental damage to produce and doesn't save the forests - I'd have to say no. Tree farms save the U.S. forests in conjunction with set asides.
How about the P-P-P-Powerbook?
signatures are for fools with hands
I don't know about the actual boxes, but we just got 3x software boxes (standard book sized), one each in a 1' cubed shipping box. This from one of the largest distributors in the country.
Talk about driving up the shipping price...
No, not laptop batteries; CMOS batteries. Standard CR2032 button cells. We had a batch of machines (SX270), a few of which shipped with CMOS batteries going bad, so we RMA'd for 5 new CMOS batteries. (as was policy at the time -- might as well get all of our warranty support that we can, and such.)
We received a box about 12 x 12 x 8 inches. This box contained 5 inner boxes, each about the size of a standard retail software box. Inside each box, the top and bottom were covered in eggcarton foam. In the center of each box was a single CMOS battery.
Every cloud has a silver lining (except for the mushroom shaped ones, which have a lining of Iridium & Strontium 90)
Yesterday we got what sounds like the exact same package. A big box containing nothing but a single slip of paper... why they couldn't stick it in an envelope (or even just an email) is beyond me. I can only assume Microsoft has paid FedEx some massive amount for a bulk lot of as many of those boxes as they feel like sending, because we always get the same sized box from MS, whether it's a dozen CDs plus technical documentation, or a just a single CD or piece of paper.
The other one I always wonder about is why Dell feels the need to seal every single component inside the box of a new PC in plastic, even if it's just a single sheet of paper...
"so what is the worst example of excessive tech packaging you've received?""
The browser that slashdot came in.
Bought a tiny home firewall online. About 15cm x 10cm x 3cm (6in x 4in x 1in for the metrically impaired).
First the firewall was bubble wrapped. OK. Then the bubble wrap had a cardboard support. Fine. Then the OEM box box - this is where it starts to get crazy. That was easily 40cm x 20cm x 10cm. It was shrink wrapped, and then wrapped in another layour of bubble wrap by the reseller, and packed with scrunched up newspaper. It was then put in another box which must have been about 60cm x 40cm x 20cm. All of which was taped up and put inside a courier bag.
Now I'm not keen on damaged mail order goods, but that is just getting silly.
I recently purchased two StoreEdge units with about 12 TB of storage... each unit has two power supplies and hence requires two power cords. Each cord came packaged in its own box, the size of a thick laptop with the four boxes arriving inside another larger box. Each piece of software, of which they shipped two copies, was also shipped in some weird boxing while arriving inside the box the unit itself came in.
Totally fucking absurd. Why the hell do four powercables need to be shipped in four separate boxes? Why do CDs already in sleeves, need to be boxed twice before being put into yet another box?
Sorry for the rant. That experience really brought out the violently fanatic "environmentalist" in me. It reminded me of an endless matrioshka sans the artistic angle.
The Logitech V200 cordless mouse comes in plastic packaging that is so thick, I would say that a circular saw is the most appropriate tool for opening it. It's probably at least twice as thick as it needs to be. I think that the only explanation for that is to make you so thoroughly mangle the package that you would feel bad about returning it if you change your mind.
disclaimer: not my picture - found it on 4chan /G (probably nsfw) a while ago and saved it because it was so damn funny. Anyway here it is - an SD card and it's packaging (from newegg if I remember correctly).
I recently got some telecom equipment (DS3 Mux, patch panels, etc.). It arrived in several medium to large sized boxes. I opened one. Under a large wad of paper padding was....one patch cable for the mux. No, not a big cable but a thin 18" cable. In another box was...the other patch cable. I kept opening similar boxes till there was a very small pile of equipment and a huge pile of boxes and paper in the middle of the room.
~~~~~~~
"You are not remembered for doing what is expected of you." - Atul Chitnis
If overkill on media counts, I once bought a copy of the original EGA version of Lemmings. It came on a 5 1/4" CD. The data itself was a total of 512K. The game would have fit on a double -density 5 1/4" floppy.
Now if we are talking about shipping packages, I receive 1 or 2 floppy disks per month via overnight FedEx from one of our data vendors. It comes in a padded FedEx envelope stuffed in a small FedEx shipping box. The real kicker: The files on the disk are e-mailed to us as well. We have never used the content from the actual disks. I just peel off the labels and add them to a stack at my desk.
A perfectly normal serial cable, 3 meters long. It was sent by Digital to use with a PDP-11 in the datacenter. The cable was wound a few times to about 60cm diameter and put in an antistatic bag. The bag was put in one of those white, silky paper-like protection bags, wrapped in bubble-wrap and placed in a flat cardboard box, about 70x70x10cm. That box had been placed in the center of a box around 100x100x60cm, surrounded by those plastic impact-resistant "beans".
No wonder that company went under.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
UPS delivered a large box to our work about 30"x20"x12".. nearly large enough for the tape library we ordered. Inside was some plastic balloon padding and another heavy-duty shipping box about the size of a briefcase. Inside that was a tiny box containing a plastic bag containing a stupid promotional pen... and the warranty paper for the Quantum tape library.
The pen is pinned to my cubicle wall. I think I referred to the warranty paper once.
Everyone is entitled to his own opinions, but not his own facts.
Every box has 2 weights to it as far as the shippers are concerned: physical weight, and volumetric weight.
What probably happens is:
Retail
the manufacturer finds the optimum box size to relay the information they want on the box, then adjust that for the box that some number of them fit into, finally making adjustments for pallet packing. This final packaged box weight may or may not fall under the physical weight of the item. The reseller then has to add to the packaging when they send it to the consumer.
OEM
The reseller gets a bunch of parts together in some sort of skid container which needs packaging to be put into a box. These resellers get discounts when they order larger quantities of the boxes, and they know that customers hate paying a ton for shipping a trivial sizes, so they get boxes that they know the volumetric weight of. 13x9x7 inches is the rough 'universal' size in the industry I'm in that you can ship UPS and it will be 1lb by volume. 13x13x9 is the 1 lb by volume for air shipments.
Humans are slow, innaccurate, and brilliant; computers are fast, acurrate, and dumb; together they are unbeatable
Maximum PC magazine received a few hard drives for review from a manufacturer they would not name, about a year about. What were they packaged in? Four CRATES, yes WOODEN CRATES, three of which were completely empty.
I blame geof's speakers.
HP and Insight paired up to give us a good one. We ordered from Insight the "Advanced Pack" for HPs integrated Lights Out (iLO) feature on a Proliant server. This was several years ago when they had just started including the "basic" iLO for free on all their servers.
We recieved from Insight a box about 3/4 the size of a standard tower computer box. We opened it up to find a box the size you'd expect to find a full-sized array controller card in, plus a few large shipping air-bladders.
We opened up the array-controller sized box to find foam egg crate packaging securing what looked like a cd sleeve.
We opened up the CD sleeve to find inside the front cover, a number. We then used that number to "unlock" the "advanced features" that had really been there all the time.
The thing that I think makes this packaging especially over the top is that the number could have just as easily been put in a plain text email. "Shipping" and "packaging" were not even necessary to get this into our hands. We would have gotten it faster, cheaper and it would have cost them less to do it.
After all that, I'm afraid to say it actually got a little worse. The truth is, we didn't really order just one of them; we ordered three. All came packaged exactly the same way. Insight didn't make any effort to consolidate the smaller boxes into just one of the larger ones.
TW
I'd ordered several software licensees for a Unix C++ compiler. Eventually a large box showed up at my cube. It was a full size computer/monitor box. Probably about 3 foot by 3 foot by 4 foot. Inside that box was another slightly smaller box that had a shipping label that showed that it had been shipped to from another facility to the facility that had shipped the larger box. Inside this box was yet another shipping box also with a label, inside that was a large legal size manila envelope with a mailing label. Inside of that was a white envelope (no mailing label this time). And finally inside of that was a single 4" by 5" sheet of paper containing one of the software license. I found it amazing that that sheet of paper made traveled through so many shipping facilities, each time getting another layer of boxes before finally arriving.
The next license arrived similarly packed (only the large computer size box wasn't used for it.) My only guesses are either they wanted to impress upon us how valuable/expensive the license was, or that they had some sort of standardized shipping process that assumed everything was workstations.
This is nothing.
I have you ALL beat.
I recently ordered Suse 10.1 and it arrived on DVD's...LOTS of them. They put a single bit on each DVD, in which was placed in a DVD box, which was wrapped in plastic, placed in a cardboard box, wrapped in bubble wrap, then placed into another box which was then labelled and shipped.
They're no fools. You ever need warranty service on your C++ compiler, you better have saved all those boxes.
Sad to break this to you, but most species of hemp contain at most traces of THC. And after the early 1900's strains of hemp have been selected which score even lower.
To give you some numbers, the legal upper limit for THC content industrial hemp in Europe is 0.3% and most strains contain actually safely less than that. By comparison, the drug varieties contain 20% to 30% THC. So think literally having to smoke 100 times (or more) as much to get the same high. You'd have to literally smoke several pounds of industrial hemp to get the same high as from a join of the drug varieties. At which point, you'd either asphixiate from the smoke, or (more likely) it would take so long as to not get a high at all. The organism would get rid of it faster than you can get it into your system.
It's a plant that's been cultivated since the stone age for its fibres. (Which contain even less THC, btw.) It's been one of humanity's main sources of material for clothes, ropes, sacks, etc, for literally tens of thousands of years. Even paper. The USA Declaration Of Independence was drafted on hemp paper, btw. Even nowadays it's cultivated in the whole world except the USA... even though it's legal to _import_ industrial hemp in the USA. How's that for a stupid hypocrisy?
At any rate, there are plenty of plantations all around the world. Not only in Europe and Asia, but even right next to you in Canada. We already know how much it yields per acre, and how much is stolen by stoners. Hint: none at all is stolen by stoners, because it's freaking useless to them.
In the USA the ban has more to do with (A) the cotton lobby, and (B) with a good dose of government hypocrisy and putting up a jolly good "war on drugs" show. You _can_ make sure which varieties people grow, and every country except the USA does that. You just require a license for growing it, and then you go and check what those people grow. It's that simple.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Received a box about the size of three stacked PC case PSUs. On opening it we initially though it was empty, but when we read the manifest, sure enough there was a two inch sticker in there which according to the instructions (!) was to be stuck onto a Dell cabinet that had been delivered the week before.
Reading a few of these, they can be excused away at least somewhat: They're for one-off items, that perhaps the company just put into one of the boxes they had on hand.
The ones that bug the hell out of me are the big companies that ship stuff completely overpackaged *routinely* for completely standard items.
Example 1: Dell Latitude notebooks. They come in a 2'x2'x2' box. Inside this are a few smaller boxes, suspended in the middle with some foam standoffs. Open those up, and there's more foam surrounding the notebook. Open another one, bigger than the entire notebook, with cardboard standoffs holding the battery. Open another one that has documentation and CDs, each wrapped in plastic. I'd estimate that 80% of the packaging is air space. Of the 20% non-air, 50% is foam. By comparison, Macbooks come very nicely packed. We can fit 10 macbooks in their packaging inside one Dell notebook box, with plenty of rattling around room to spare. This is particularly annoying, because it takes up HUGE amounts of storage space for us. We have to at least shed the outer box to compress things down before they go in the store room.
Example 2: Ordering keyboards from HP. Just a keyboard. Basic model. They take the keyboard and put it in plastic. Then they put that into a box (#1).
If you order a keyboard a la carte, they have another box, #2, custom made just the right size to fit Box #1, so they can ship it to you. This seems to be done for the purpose of having a different ordering number for the unit. IE, the part code for a PC means you get a box with a PC, a manual, and a Box #1. The part code for a keyboard means a box with a Box #1.
If you order 10 keyboards, they put 10 Box #2s into an aggregator box, Box #3.
Then they put Box #3 into a shipping box, Box #4, which gets the shipping label.
Thus, boxes:
#1: Protect the keyboard
#2: Add a part code
#3: Bundle 10 keyboards together
#4: Place to put the shipping label
It's almost like the joke recursive gift box I saw a friend get for their birthday one year.
Mandriva CD into DVD drive, Linux on hard disk, never used MS-Windows or its CD since.
Waste of time OEM installing Win or packaging up the CD for it.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
You know the kind I am talking about - it would be fine if you could just pull it apart, but it is "welded" together. So you pull out a heavy duty utility knife 'cause not even a pocket knife will do it. Then you have to figure out where to pull your cut through this incredibly tough plastic - better hope you don't go through the manual cause it is hard to RTFM when it has been shredded. I can't tell you how many times I have come close to my nifty new mp3 player (or whatever) with the knife. After you have made one cut through this stuff, you try to pull it apart - it still won't budge, but you manage to slice your finger open on the now sharp plastic. With the blood dripping on your new toy, you make that second cut and squeeze it out and as you hold the bittersweet prize for your efforts you raise your blooded hands to the sky and scream "WHY THE FUCK DO THEY USE THIS SHIT???" Lucky for "them," the shiny new toy inside comforts your rage that might have made you litigious or postal and soon you are back on Amazon ordering some new toy oblious to the fack that it too will come packaged in that crap.
Has anyone made a hate website about this packaging?
There's been plenty of naming and shaming in this story so far. How about mentioning a few outfits that aren't wasteful? I'd like to direct some positive attention towards companies that pack appropriately.
As an example, I recently ordered some laptop RAM from OemPCWorld.com. I didn't have good specs on what modules would work, so I ordered 3, planning to return 2. According to their return policy, this is cool.
What arrived in the mail was a letter-size FedEx cardboard envelope. Inside that was my receipt and a half-size USPS cardboard return envelope, post-paid, which I'd added to my order to facilitate the return. Inside that were three tiny antistatic mylar bags, each with an SODIMM in it.
Absolutely perfect. I couldn't have packed it better if I'd tried; there was no wasted space, the 2 layers of cardboard provided more than enough protection against flex, and the whole thing weighed just a few ounces.
Another company that does things right: BG Micro. Recently ordered about $30 worth of stuff from them, some small tools, a few components, nothing huge. They wedged it all into the standard textbook-sized USPS box. The fragile bits were protected in individual boxes within, but most of the durable stuff just got a turn of bubble wrap, if that. It was sensible, and everything was in perfect shape when it arrived.
Another: Minimus. Does it bother you that the average first-aid kit contains about a 3:1 ratio of bandages to antiseptic wipes? Shouldn't it be the other way around? I wanted to properly equip my kit, but Ididn't want to buy a box of 1,000 alcohol or iodine wipes. Thanks to Minimus, I didn't have to. They carry everything from ketchup and mustard packets, to single-use bug repellent towelettes, all sorts of medical supplies, laundry soap, hand sanitizer, even coffee and tea. I can't say enough good things about this company. I stocked up the entire family's first-aid kits, equipped my travel bag with some laptop screen wipes, and tried a new brand of toothpaste. The whole mess came in a 5x5x4-inch box, and that still left about half the box as air space. Single-use products are the epitome of excessive packaging, but I ordered for convenience. Besides, Burn-Jel isn't something I need a gallon of.
I'm not affiliated in any way with any of the above companies, just a satisfied customer. How about your experiences?
...but a plant with 20-30% THC is pretty unheard of - even the best strains contain generally 7-9% THC, rarely as much as 11%, without counting using a sulphuric acid bath to convert CBDs and CBNs into Delta-11 THC (Not Delta-9 THC which is found naturally inside the plant.) I used to grow this shit, and I could easily tell you that a 20-30% THC content in a plant would make any pharmaceutical company manufacturing Marinol very unhappy, very quickly.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
It actually makes some sense. Every item has a shock limit, measured in Gs. Sensitive avionics can be down in the 15-20G (multiples of gravity) range. CRT monitors are somewhere around 75G on average. Typical fine dinnerware goes about 100-125G.
Here's the key - take the box drop height and divide it by the distance from the nearest point of your item to the nearest point on the outer box. That is the minimum G force your item will receive if you have the perfect packaging material for that exact drop. You can only do worse, and the real figure is often 2-5 times that number. Soft foams, eggcrate, cutouts, and collapsable cardboard are all ways to try an linearize that shock response to minimize damage.
Given that a box in shipping can easily be dropped 4-5 feet from a truck tot he ground, or off a loading dock, and add a couple of feet for the masculine "throw" by the operator, and you can easily get 6 feet. In a 2' square box, with a 12" wide laptop, there's only 6" of space from edge to outside if it's perfectly centered. 72/6=12Gs. Now, that's for the perfect system; theirs is probably at 25-33% efficiency, which is pretty good, so now we're in the 36-48G range. And for a piece of electronic equipment costing $1000-3000, that's probably about right.
Oh, and just to let you know, a box full of packing peanuts probably has a 10% efficiency, with light resilient foam coming in around 15%. It's really _really_ hard to get above 50%.
(Yes, I've actually done a bit of packaging engineering to make sure some sensitive gear could withstant MIL-810 shipping requirements)
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
We started getting these boxes last spring, and they show no signs of letting up. We still haven't determined (because the company that shall not be named is in such disarray that we can't find anyone who knows what the hell's going on) whether we're getting the upgrade of approximately 1,500 licenses we ordered, or a refresh of all 12,000 licenses that we own. Either way, it's a fucking lot of boxes, or a motherfucking lot of boxes. Our Administrative Assistants love it when a pallet of these things show up. They open all that packaging up and stuff the paper inside a single box.
All of this data, of course, could have been printed on a single piece of paper.
My book, podcast