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Amazon Tries To Figure Out the Packaging Box Problem It Created (t.co)
Have you noticed that your tiniest ecommerce items, which used to be shipped in a box, are now arriving in a padded envelope? WSJ reports: Amazon is trying to ship each order in one correctly sized package instead of multiple boxes, responding to rising shipping costs and consumers' concern about the environmental impact (Editor's note: the link may be paywalled) and general nuisance of all that cardboard. That means adding bubble envelopes, tweaking algorithms and negotiating with manufacturers to make smaller packaging specifically for online sales, not store shelves. [...] This year, Amazon added machines in its warehouses that create padded mailers on demand to fit smaller items, all of which used to go into the company's smallest-sized box. Almost half of all of Amazon's products fit into the new mailers and poly bags, says Kim Houchens, director of customer packaging experience. Her team has been working to improve algorithms that help decide which size box and how many items should be packed together in each shipment. The algorithms use machine learning to test out new combinations -- for example, shipping a breakable item in a smaller box with less cushioning. The algorithm can scan customer reviews and other data to see if it worked and adjust as needed.
love the quote" The algorithms use machine learning to test out new combinations -- for example, shipping a breakable item in a smaller box with less cushioning. The algorithm can scan customer reviews and other data to see if it worked and adjust as needed."
so peoples packages are now used for "testing"... well that lamp broke... oh well, try something new....that poor person at the end of it now has a broken lamp to deal with.
It's not a typo if you understood the meaning!
I would think the cardboard packages are much more reusable and recyclable than the plastic lined paper envelopes.
Amazon should be leading the way into sustainable packaging, even multi use returnable packaging.
When ordering multiple items from Amazon, from what I can tell the algorithm is "throw all items in bon with a few inflated tubes and let everything fend for itself".
To be fair as this article says, some things have stated coming individually packaged and in better shape. But even recently we've received a number of items that had a few dings from being loose in package. Were I ordering anything like an action figure I didn't want a card even slightly bent on, I'd be super leery of Amazon still.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Tell me the math behind putting a small fragile cube inside a very large box with a hard slab of clay and drop kicking it all the way to my house. There's no way having that much space to move around (about 4x the size of the fragile box) with a few strips of butcher paper for padding was done by good coding.
AliExpress and ChinaPost nearly always send in a plastic bag that resembles a thicker bin liner made of I assume recycled plastics.
Cardboard box is the last resort.
Germany has a better idea.The consumer simply returns ALL packing to the store and they have to pay to genuinely recycle it. This led to much less consumer packaging and putting corn flakes in a box 3 times the necessary size.
In Australia, Amazon has failed(like Canada) and is not the cheapest, even for its own products. AliExpress must be so happy.
When they stop SHIPPING MY BOOKS IN ENVELOPES.
I get books with the corners all beat the fuck up.
The whole freight industry is very boring. It would be a lot more fun to see each package custom-made for each product. Each package should be the convex hull of the contained item. Nothing else need change.
What the standard shipping container did for global logistics, reusable boxes will do for home delivery. End goal: full automation.
This should be banned on ./
Doesn't anyone else understands the risk of a shortened URL as a "news source"? ...Unless of course, everyone only reads the summary...!
-ACnoRTFA
The cost is rising because they sell more. If your send 2 packages instead of 1 the previous week, your cost has 'risen' 100%. So the cost per item has staid the same. They just want to "understandably" reduce the cost.
And that 'customer concern' is just an added bonus they can add as to why they do it. I reality it is just about money. Not that that is a bad thing.
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This article reminds me of books I received from an Amazon UK order I placed earlier this year. The post office handed me the remains of the box (2 pieces of cardboard) - and the contents, 3 soft-backed books (one of which was slightly damaged - just not enough to make me goto the trouble of returning it).
Amazon Tries To Figure Out the Packaging Box Problem It Created
Seriously?
This morning I woke up, then I made breakfast.
Is this me "Trying To Figure Out The Food Shortage Problem I Created"?
They just had an idea to lower cost and now they're implementing it.
Is this news-worthy because it's Amazon instead of any of the millions of other random companies around the globe doing similar things every single day?
Put two packages in the same truck, and deliver two packages to the same destination. How is this more or less environmental friendly than one package? For transportation, its the opposite. Multiple smaller packages fill trucks more efficiently than a lower number of bigger packages. Also, by combining items into common packages, often there's unnecessary space wasted, decreasing the efficiency of the trucks further.
The only thing saved on is cardboard, which is produced mainly from recycled cardboard anyway.
Looks like it really is just customer concerns.
Why is the link to a t.co URL? So Slashdot's not only doing slashvertisements but also click tracking now?
"Mike! Your giant dildo is here!"
I'd rather they spend some time trying to understand delivery hours. Lately Amazon has been trying to deliver packages themselves instead of using couriers like UPS or FedEx. I usually have stuff shipped to me at work because 1) it's more secure and 2) my driveway is long and un-navigable during the winter by delivery trucks (steep grade + ice). But Amazon hasn't figured out how to instruct their delivery drivers about hours of operation for businesses so they constantly try to deliver after hours. For business addresses hours of operation are a real thing and they need to figure that out sooner rather than later. Not every business is open 8am-5pm.
This is all about Amazon reducing shipping costs, NOTHING to do with environment.
It can be about both. Anything that reduces material waste is both an economic benefit and an environmental benefit. While I'd agree that Amazon's primary motivation is almost certainly economic that doesn't mean that environmental considerations are nil. It can be a win/win in this case potentially.
If only there was a place you could go to buy goods at your convenience precisely when needed, avoiding the shipping step... That would be amazing!
Well when they invent such a thing then I'll change my buying habits because the options now are anything but convenient. As it is I have FAR too busy a schedule to want to want to spend hours getting in my car, driving to a random location on a map, browsing through merchandise on a scavenger hunt, paying an exorbitant markup, and being unable to do something else more productive with my time.
Oh and stores still ship stuff they just use YOUR vehicle to do the shipping instead of theirs. So unless you have a store with a star trek transporter I don't know about it's still getting shipped and probably less efficiently.
so peoples packages are now used for "testing"... well that lamp broke... oh well, try something new....that poor person at the end of it now has a broken lamp to deal with.
Probably more along the lines of learning from their mistakes. I've done a lot of shipping. I used to own a company that shipped tens of thousands of custom boxed packages a year. We had a good crew but there were a lot of lessons we learned the hard way and effectively on our customer's dime. I can only imagine the difficulty in scaling what we did up to the scale of Amazon. Basically they are going to have shipping problems - the real question is whether they can use the information learned from the problems to make the system better and more efficient.
Think of it this way. It's a little like how doctors learn. The only way for a doctor to learn to be a doctor is to practice on real patients. And some of those patients are going to be hurt by the mistakes the new doctor makes learning to be a doctor. Yes possibly you and no there isn't a better way to do it. You cannot learn it out of a book nor can you nerf the consequences. Some of us have to get hurt or die so that a lot more people can live. For Amazon the consequences aren't so dire but the principle is the same. The only way they are going to learn about a lot of problems is to test them in the real world. And that will be the same for every other company. They'll work hard to think it through ahead of time but nobody can foresee every obstacle.
>" responding to rising shipping costs and consumers' concern about the environmental impact "
I can't stand those damn "poly bags". They are beyond frustrating to try and remove the damn labels and the bags are not recyclable. The padded envelopes lined in bubble wrap are not any better.
Just give me a nice cardboard box with some scrunched paper for padding...
Are the padded mailers even recyclable? They aren't marked as such.
Was immediately reminded of this el reg article:
https://www.theregister.co.uk/...
There is no XUL, only WebExtensions...
Dang, my wife loves the free cardboard boxes for various purposes.
How is a free cardboard box that is more environmentally friendly than plastic wrap a "problem"?
Might kill Amazon's business model, but start charging a small, flat fee per order regardless of order size. Including for Prime customers. I know my wife will order something on Monday and something else on Tuesday when she could theoretically have combined those two purchases into a single order. Charging a per-order fee might encourage people to time-shift some of their purchases to consolidate them into a single order.
stop the high quotas so workers have more time to wait for an box size that needs to be refilled / stop them for just dumping into the nearest box to make rate.
Amazon does everything else now, maybe they can start doing on-demand cardboard pickups for Prime customers. Or, they could collect recyclables in general and assign a certain day of the week to send a truck by your house to collect them from a bin placed at your curb. This kind of zero-click technology is incredibly innovative, and clearly warrants a patent.
That's actually a directorate level career?
I wonder how many children pick Master of bags, boxes and packing peanuts as their goal in life in their 5th grade career day.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
I wonder what reviews might lead an algorithm to decide that it's necessary to ship a gel wrist rest for keyboards like this:
https://i.imgur.com/t9gCMCM.jp...
I was so dumbfounded by the size and the packaging material, I didn't even realize that the box was double-walled until I tried tearing it up to throw it into recycling.
(Though to be fair and ruin part of the joke, that was an Amazon marketplace seller who didn't user amazon for shipping.)
How about Amazon customers drop off their good cardboard boxes at the nearest Whole Foods, maybe for a for a small refund?
Good boxes can be reused, ones deemed not good enough can be recycled.
The problem is that Amazon's not just trying to ship the items well. They're trying to cut corners to the absolute cheapest possible.
Having been on the shippers end that it s distinction without a difference. I'm not sure people fully appreciate just how complicated that problem is. Amazon isn't a high margin business so they have a tough balancing act. They need to package well enough but not waste money over packaging. This is not an easy thing to do.
I assure you that when you hire tens of thousands of people to pack and ship random orders of stuff, not all of them are going to be the best and brightest. If you think you have a design for a packaging system that will optimize everything and that even a dumb temp employee can get right there are untold riches awaiting you. It's an incredibly difficult problem at any kind of non-trivial scale.
It always deeply irritates me when a box (sometimes radically oversized) is used to ship something that could easily have just been put into an envelope instead. I'm very happy to hear that Amazon is addressing this. I hope it catches on with others as well.
From TFS:
This is also really welcome! Product packaging designed for store shelves has also bothered me for a very long time (whether I get them from a physical store or not). With so many things, I end up tossing out a greater mass in worthless packaging than the item itself has. It's insane. It's even more insane when the reason for the overpackaging (marketing from the shelf) is completely missing.
Also, package tracking is much better with USPS, and they've yet to mess up a delivery.
That's kind of damning with faint praise because I find USPS tracking to be borderline useless. It typically doesn't tell you much if anything about where the package is until it is already delivered. UPS and FedEx are much better in this regard.
If they weren't a relatively high-margin business, they wouldn't be wasting my shipping subscription dollars producing original video content I never asked for.
Amazon's financial statements are public record. You can verify for yourself that they have gross margins roughly comparable to Walmart or Target or Home Depot, none of which are high margin businesses. The fact that they plow their profits back into video production and other projects has nothing to do with their margins. Walmart is the canonical low margin business but if you do enough volume low margin businesses can be very profitable.
I liked the combination of "...responding to ... consumers' concern about the environmental impact ... That means adding bubble envelopes". Those bubble envelopes are a glued sandwich of polyetheline and paper, which can't be recycled. Good job adressing environmental concerns, Amazon! I'm sure Scott Pruitt is thrilled.
On the one hand, switching to bubble envelopes instead of boxes means less packaging. On the other hand, it means replacing packaging that can be recycled with packaging that cannot be. Not sure it's a net gain.
In the mold of Google, amazon's customers become the subject of machines.
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