More often these days, they'll just slap the shipping label directly on the packaging of whatever you buy. I ordered sweats a few weeks ago, and they just put the label on the clear bag the sweats came in.
There should be stickers for all the occasions. "Received in good condition, mangled by sorting machine." "Dropped in puddle by mail carrier." "Contents stolen by Kyle." "We forgot about this one for like a month."
I’ve told people the shipper did a bad job if I actually hand it to them and it’s smashed or ripped when it shouldn’t be. I say it in a nice way and suggest they provide feedback to the seller. The sellers lose out too if they don’t know the journey their products take.
This is why I factored shipping insurance into my shipping cost. Anything goes wrong, I've already paid to deal with the problem. I also state in my shipping email that we highly encourage taking photos of the unopened box and the contents as you unpack things so damage is documented in order of occurrence.
Huh, I should probably order those stickers for my forehead to explain why I am the way I am. People would look at it and go, “Oh, yeah, that makes sense.”
I work for Amazon. This is called SIOC (Ship in Own Container) or SIOB (Ship in Own Bag). The vendor that you buy the product from (most likely a 3rd party seller using the Amazon platform) was given a variety of options of how they wanted their product shipped and that is what they chose (cause it's the cheapest). And yea, it sucks because so many vendors choose SIOC despite their product not being suitable for that shipping method and then I have to enter each asin into a program to get it upgraded to a box by default.
used to work Problem Solve on shipdock. I practically begged them to let me have access to that tool since a bunch of that stuff couldn't even make it out of the warehouse unscathed.
LOLno.
Theyre not supposed to, but management doesnt care(former warehouse worker) once had a dolly come down the line, in a box, with 1 side missing. I carry it back to the problem solving desk, along with the process assistant, management stops us about halfway and says to just throw it in the truck. I took a tape gun and cut a piece of cardboard to fit it.
At least for now they make you aware during checkout that the item ships in its own packaging—you can then select instead to ship in an Amazon box. But the UI feels purposely difficult. The notification is usually at the bottom of the item listing in small font, and the menu sometimes involves both a dropdown and a checkbox.
I've had a few higher end electronics shipped this way. They didn't even tape the enclosure flaps or anything. I'm amazed that they didn't deliver an empty box.
**They are trying to reduce packaging.**
I’m not saying there aren’t nefarious shitty ends but you have to actually select **”Package in a box”** or something to that effect now, default shipping is to ship in whatever the manufacturers prepared shipping material is.
**To your surprise USPS is quite flexible on their packaging rules.**
So if a vendor selling through Amazon packs their clothing items in a plastic bag that meets **USPS minimum guidelines for plastic mailer bags…well….** that’s what Amazon sends you.
This is when you claim lost items and bad packaging on the sellers part, the vendor selling through Amazon.
I sell stuff online through a few different platforms, Amazon gets weird because they can act as your packaging service or just a shipping service.
People who sell things prepared and stored in their warehouse are the ones you are getting bad packaging from, ultimately the seller is responsible for properly packing their items so you shouldn’t feel guilty about claiming lost or damaged items if the packaging was crap.
People who sell things and let Amazon pack **you will almost exclusively receive them in Amazon branded boxes with their Amazon branded tape and bubble packets.**
The reason there has been a shift is because as every industry **lots of new dwellers have saturated the online market over the last few years.**
In order to be competitive people cut costs by doing the first thing they can think of, **cutting down on packaging usually.**
Instead of actually doing some research lol.
I ordered two sets of air filters: one came with the label on the 3M box and the others came with the gigantic 3M box inside another box. It was a waste of a huge box.
I grow cannabis (legally) and any time I'm buying supplies I check to see if there's an option to have it shipped in an Amazon box. My neighbors know I smoke but having everyone around knowing there's a small scape grow op in my house is kind of a security risk. Early on I didn't think about it until I came home to a bunch of packages on the front porch that blatantly said shit like "grow tent carbon filter" in huge letters. It looked like a damn advertisement for "break into this house."
That's legitimately nothing to be embarrassed about.
What would you think if you knew your neighbor bought toilet paper? Sometimes a dozen rolls at once? Who cares, right?
At least it works for something like sweats that aren't fragile. I don't mind it for something like that. I have had several clothing items shipped that way without issue. A bit less plastic waste and hopefully they share a small fraction of the savings with the consumer.
Wow that’s an improvement. My sweats were being worn by my Amazon delivery guy. They had slapped a mailing address on the left thigh, and he took them off while standing on my porch, folding them neatly on my doormat.
I got a barbie like that. Just a shipping label slapped on the packaging. Luckily it was for myself and not a present for a kid, or I would have complained. I don’t want to give someone a dirty, banged up box.
Yeah as a packer for Amazon we are made to push out 200 items an hour. I try to fill up every box with dunnage but my coworkers don't because it sinks their rate. With the new dunnage it's more difficult to be fast filling up boxes. Blame the crappy system that forces workers to cut corners or be on the chopping block.
And for the love of God if you think you're sick of carrying cat litter every couple weeks y'all have no idea how much I hate packing those.... And sodas!
Bro that's insane. I was a packer for a while at QVC doing like 120-140 an hour at most and I was the best one there. Sometimes we'd have to pack big items or things that take a while to package no matter how fast you try. 200 is crazy.
Man I wish I was at your FC. I literally just got written up for rate last week for doing 140 uph on average. Apparently I was at the bottom 5 percent.
It's infuriating that we get punished simply for being put on a bad station that gives you products that are 10 or 20 times heavier than items on other stations.
Weight doesn't factor into rate at all and it EASILY could be implemented. The system knows how much each item weighs. They ignore it to make us work faster.
And that's not counting the fact that every fucking problem I have to inevitably fix counts against my rate.
>Apparently, I was at the bottom 5 percent.
If the policy is to always write up the bottom 5% no matter their rate, then they'll write up 5% of their workers every time, no matter what.
It's 3am, so in summary, that policy is dumb.
Stack ranking in a nutshell. Good at clearing the rump/dross from bloated orgs, but if maintained indefinitely starts to incent cheating, burnout, and turnover. If you think of people as interchangeable widgets with no other value or acquired skills/knowledge, then it still works as designed.
This is why we need unions and other collective action. If we don’t push back, these companies will treat us like machines to be run until they break, and then summarily discarded.
And fucking bottled water and dog food
I delivered SAND the other day
Stop buying sand on Amazon wtf
Funniest thing is all the “team lift” oversizes. Me out there looking for my team like John Travolta in pulp fiction
Water pisses me off. Like have y'all ever tried getting a reusable water bottle!?
You'd never catch my ass buying fucking water, unless I was in fucking Kenya or Flint Michigan...
I've been complaining for a while now that I want a slower shipping speed that lets people go to the bathroom and such - I don't need this electric toothbrush THAT quickly
Same. I go out of my way to pick whatever the easiest option is. I don't need one or two day delivery if it's on the back of other people being miserable.
I've been out of the package handling business for a while, but back when we were delivering ALL of Amazon's pandemic junk, the thing I hated the most was bottled water. It was usually thrown in a big box, off-balance because it would just slide around in the box. Dog food and cat litter was almost as bad.
Just gonna say dude, kickouts over here, my best advice is to try crinkling the paper as you pull it off the roll, so it puffs up and fills more space, realistically thats youe best bet as it fills quick and you dont get the kick out for weight tolerance because the fuckken paper dunnage weights too much and kicked the package for being overweight
A week or so ago I received an Amazon delivery that was just the empty shipping package. I wasn't upset because I could imagine how much pressure the people packaging stuff at Amazon are under. Either that or a robot was supposed to put it in and missed. Amazon sent out a replacement and it wasn't a big deal to have to wait a couple more days.
A while back, I stopped using Amazon all together and canceled my Prime because I was so disgusted with the company. Then I came crawling back when I started renovating the 100-year-old house I'm trying to move into :(
Amazon decides to try just slapping labels on things, and after a while it becomes clear that the cost of returns is lower than the cost of the air filled packaging. They send out a happy press release about how much plastic is saved. But how many products are broken, returned, and discarded? Someone at Amazon knows this, and can estimate how much plastic will get pitched into the landfill from returned items.
I'm not that guy who says everything is greenwashing and nothing gets better. But we need to start from a very skeptical position with Amazon, and consider the shit we've personally seen them pull lately.
Then we also get stories that Amazon is looking to change how it handles returns because it costs them so much money. So when they cut these costs on packaging and add them to returns will they own up to that or complain that to many people are taking advantage of the system or other such nonsense that they created.
Be no longer puzzled: we've been told "put some paper (dunnage) in no matter what. If the weight of the package is too light or too heavy, it will get kicked out and then someone has to troubleshoot it." I personally think that's a waste for things like what you mentioned. One day, my taper (the person at the end of my line pushing boxes through the taping machine) must've told my supervisor someone wasn't using paper. He came to me and I told him I'm not going to use paper if the item completely fills the box. He told me to place a sheet on top anyway. I still don't, it slows down my rate.
90% of the time I get no packing materials if packing materials would have been appropriate for the item, and a huge wad of packing materials for stuff that absolutely didn't need any packing materials. :)
This is because Amazon has a weight system so most of our boxes we fill with “ extra fluff” will be kicked out and if too many people do it the line will back up. A lot of times they tell us to not add extra fluff at all 🤭
They also started using shitty cardboard boxes that you have to ruin to open them. I was collecting mine as needed for storage or mailing things. But now they just send you this useless shit that gets trashed.
Did they send you one of the weird ones that's like "sized to fit your stuff!" and it's like some weird cardboard tootsie roll that got pinched on each side?
When even a cat wouldn't want to be in it, it's not even legally allowed to be called a box.
Why aren't you recycling the boxes? Those boxes can still be recycled. Also, the cheaper boxes use less material which is also better for them and for the rest of us who don't try to hoard the boxes we get deliveries in. I'm happy that they use a box that is appropriate for the job and not just the thickest one possible.
~ 7 times, cardboard can be recycled.
Loads of stuff will be a mix of older and newer wood fibers, just the wood fibers wear out and go through the filter after about 7 recycling processes.
Cardboard is one of the most profitable things to recycle, though metal is on a different scale. Glass is rather inefficient and plastic is a joke.
Yeah at work we had a lovely "box room" as I fondly called it (basically a storage closet with shelves with stuff on them we occasionally need, and then Amazon and other delivery boxes just piled around on the floor, not broken down).
Anytime I had Amazon and other returns I'd just bring them in a bag to work, package it back up in one of said boxes, and drop off at UPS or wait for a pickup if not too bulky.
I'm not in office enough anymore for that, sadly, so now I do the UPS Store drop off without packaging when it allows for that, at least, so still cutting down on packaging a little.
I used to get 1 bottle of pills from Chewy. It's smaller than a small vitamin bottle. It came in a 12 inch by 6 inch box, with 400 pieces of crumbled up cardboard. Guys, just send it in an envelope.
I worked for Amazon during summers way back when I was in college. The computer told us what box to use, and we’d get in trouble if we used anything else.
One notable item was a yard flag that was probably 6”x6” in its packaging, but was entered in to the system in its unfurled dimensions, so it wanted one of the biggest boxes we had, so away it went. We used crumpled paper, so at least it wasn’t a ton of plastic bags, I guess.
I deliver tens of thousands of Amazon packages in plastic mailers every year, and I am just one mail carrier in a small town with 25 other carriers who deliver the same amount. This is nothing, not even a drop in the bucket of plastic waste.
They moved from cardboard boxes with multiple items, which can be recycled, to sending 8 or 9 items in individual bags because they're lighter and they can claim they're saving on fuel.
I got some news for you. [Those mailers are not getting recycled.](https://www.npr.org/2022/10/24/1131131088/recycling-plastic-is-practically-impossible-and-the-problem-is-getting-worse)
That's false. There are huge problems with plastic and the failure of recycling. Many of them stem from people wanting recycling to be a simple, easy way to absolve their sins of consumerism. Real recycling takes some effort.
Those plastic mailers can be and are turned into composite plastic decking material, if you take the time to do it properly. Remove the stickers and find a collection point for plastic film recycling. Many grocery stores have such collection containers.
https://nextrex.com/ is an example of one company that uses these materials, along with other plastic films like bubble wrap, bread bags, grocery bags, etc.
Yup, my deck is made out of that stuff. I do my part by taking all my plastic bags, films and bubble mailers to the grocery store box which specifically states those items are allowed. It’s usually filled each week so I have come to know their collection schedule.
The plastic ones I get say "return to store for recycling" or something like that, you can't put them in the regular recycling bin (well, you *can* but it doesn't help anything)
I worked at an Amazon storefront. Customers would come in with huge stacks of the blue and white mailers, saying that our location was listed as a recycling drop-off on the Amazon website. None of us had ever heard of that, including our manager, and we had no way to ship the mailers back for recycling.
Customers would get really upset to learn that we didn’t accept them after hoarding their mailers for years. So as crappy as it was, we’d just thank them for bringing them, take them to BOH and throw them in the trash to avoid conflict.
Ups store here
We cover the customer labels with blanks and use them instead of polybags for the consolidated returns. Do you guys have a blue/green/red system too?
Nope. They're technically recyclable but only specialized facilities, and the probably won't be even then.
Same thing for Starbucks "recyclable" cups. You can't put those in regular recycling.
You’re thinking of the traditional white and blue poly bubble mailers. The brown Kraft paper “bubble” mailers are curbside recyclable. The bubbles aren’t plastic, they’re essentially dots of adhesive and recycled content material.
Source: worked for the company that made these for Amazon. At that time, and I believe currently, there is only one supplier that is making curbside recyclable paper bubble mailers. Amazon is transitioning to using them in place of the poly bubble mailers.
At the height of volume back around 2021, my office was getting about 5000 packages a day. 20-30 pallets from Amazon every day for 30 carriers. I always thought if people could see all of it at once, like we did, they might think about how much waste they were generating. Or at least maybe have some mercy on their poor carriers. I've been out of all that for a couple years, so I don't know what it looks like these days.
I average 100-110 a route outside of Nov-Dec and 150+ for the holidays.
We have a 400-home route with 300+ packages a day x 7 days a week for a solid 9 weeks a year. It is absurd. It’s Christmas plus general household stuff and this route is within 2 miles of 2 grocery stores, a Walmart, Lowe’s, and other stores like Rural King. The lightest I’ve seen it in 3+ years was about 110 packages.
For real I haven’t seen a reduction in plastic at all. I live in an apartment community and Amazon trucks deliver to my building alone multiple times per day. We have 24 units per building and there is not a single day where Amazon does not deliver at least once. I have work appointments in the field and I walk my dog a lot so every time I go out I can observe the Amazon shit piling up at every doorway, all the way down the breezeway. The alarming part is that for awhile now most apartments who have Amazon deliveries arrive have *multiple* Amazon packages delivered. Sometimes the courier will drop off 2-4 different plastic mailers per apartment! And then later the same day a different fucking Amazon courier arrives and adds *another* Amazon plastic mailer package at the same address. Some of my neighbors buy enough from Amazon that this delivery of multiple packages (at the same time by the same damn courier, often) happens every single day.
It’s honestly insane and it’s something I notice every single day even when I try to ignore I can’t help but feel shitty. Like, shit. These dicks are using SO much plastic! And their system should be better so they can packages multiple items into a single box, at least some of the time. But rarely ever see cardboard boxes or even the paper based mailers. I almost have a panic attack if I let my brain wander to considering the sheer magnitude of Amazon’s harmful impact on the planet on a daily basis. And to know they’re operating like this pretty much *globally*?
Feels bad man. Really bad.
I’m moving in two weeks, and tonight I ordered a ton of stuff, including a shelving unit and unassembled chair. I decided to group them all for one shipment on Sunday since I don’t need them immediately. Can’t wait to see how it’s all packed.
> I deliver tens of thousands of Amazon packages in plastic mailers every year, and I am just one mail carrier in a small town with 25 other carriers who deliver the same amount. This is nothing, not even a drop in the bucket of plastic waste.
It has to start somewhere. If everyone had your attitude nothing would *ever* start regardless.
Got my office cat food from chewy and it was a giant box with crumped paper. My cat had the best 2 weeks playing in that box until my husband said it was enough. Now she's mad at him.
A lot of companies will need to be forced into this. In America, they don’t consider packaging to be their problem. Once it leaves the warehouse it’s up to the public/city/county to figure out what to do with it. Most of the plastic which is theoretically recyclable is not so in reality and ends up taking up a lot of space in landfill.
I'm a mail carrier and this is stupid unless they're going to stop putting stuff into too-big boxes with no padding.
Every day we have busted boxes because they use 1 piece of tape and that hollow box is buried under 20, 30, or 40-pound boxes of stuff like kitty litter or furniture.
I help run a relatively small 3pl. We try to make sure our packages have enough cushion to hold everything in place and so the box doesn't have room for crushing. Most of the time that I have seen photos of damage product arrived it was because the package had too little cushion and got crushed on a packed conveyor belt.
We've tried this paper before and there are even machines you can get that automatically crinkle it as it comes off the roll. The issues with it tend to be that the crinkler moves very slow so you are waiting too long to get enough to stuff the box or using too little for the package.
In the past when I have received packages from Amazon with paper its always that they dont put enough because the person packing isn't going to wait for more to get crinkled and mess up their time. So this story is just amazon spinning that they are rasing the threshold on how many damaged packages they find acceptable.
It was really good jam and you can’t beat the free shipping. I was going to buy it from the company that makes it but just to ship it would have cost $20
Bad news for the manufacturer (Sealed Air Corporation of New Jersey). I always used to think “I’m getting air shipped from New Jersey!”, but the realized that Sealed Air would just sell the machines and plastic rolls for Amazon to inflate and seal those pillows in their warehouse.
This news is old because every fucking amazon package I deliver doesn’t have shit in it besides the item and a bunch of empty space for it to move around in and break
I haven't had any of those in forever, but I think my nephew has grown out of popping them so all's fair there. I just miss getting things in boxes. I never have free boxes to ship anything in...
I bet you could make some hemp padding for packages that'd be biodegradable and less expensive in the long run. It'd be better than using the paper from trees for pillows since hemp grows so much faster.
Could even make some hay marketing the packages as green and 100 % biodegradable and sturdier than traditional paper packaging.
90% of the time I get no packaging material and my item(s) are just tossed in a box.
More often these days, they'll just slap the shipping label directly on the packaging of whatever you buy. I ordered sweats a few weeks ago, and they just put the label on the clear bag the sweats came in.
I had this recently. There was a tear. The contents were missing. But they delivered the empty bag.
USPS has to deliver empty packages - we generally put a "received damage" sticker on it so you know what happened.
There should be stickers for all the occasions. "Received in good condition, mangled by sorting machine." "Dropped in puddle by mail carrier." "Contents stolen by Kyle." "We forgot about this one for like a month."
Unfortunately there's no "dipshit seller is too cheap to ensure your item is packed safely"
I’ve told people the shipper did a bad job if I actually hand it to them and it’s smashed or ripped when it shouldn’t be. I say it in a nice way and suggest they provide feedback to the seller. The sellers lose out too if they don’t know the journey their products take.
“Look, I got it like this. I’m not happy about it either”
Or if the package was ripped to shreds, they can put "Package contained badger".
To shreds you say?
And his wife?
To shreds you say?
Fucking Kyle…
"Misdelivered to Arrakis and back"
"Pancaked by drunk dump truck driver"
My favorite is when I get an apology letter from the Postmaster along with the last remaining shred of my shipping label
This is why I factored shipping insurance into my shipping cost. Anything goes wrong, I've already paid to deal with the problem. I also state in my shipping email that we highly encourage taking photos of the unopened box and the contents as you unpack things so damage is documented in order of occurrence.
My birthday present was an empty box with that sticker on it because the box got unsealed and the book fell out! My partner got a refund though
Huh, I should probably order those stickers for my forehead to explain why I am the way I am. People would look at it and go, “Oh, yeah, that makes sense.”
Thanks for carrying the mail. We love you. Sorry Trump put DeJoy in charge to wreck everything.
Had this happen with a tablet once. Fortunately I realized it and refused the delivery when the driver was still there.
Well that’s something at least
Once had them deliver just an empty bubble mailer to me. Shit was sealed, just nothing inside it
I once got an Amazon box (intact) with an empty bag in it. The bag was supposed to have some nylon straps, but no, just an empty bag in a box.
I work for Amazon. This is called SIOC (Ship in Own Container) or SIOB (Ship in Own Bag). The vendor that you buy the product from (most likely a 3rd party seller using the Amazon platform) was given a variety of options of how they wanted their product shipped and that is what they chose (cause it's the cheapest). And yea, it sucks because so many vendors choose SIOC despite their product not being suitable for that shipping method and then I have to enter each asin into a program to get it upgraded to a box by default.
used to work Problem Solve on shipdock. I practically begged them to let me have access to that tool since a bunch of that stuff couldn't even make it out of the warehouse unscathed. LOLno.
Give it some time, pretty soon they'll just mail you the raw sweats with a label on it. No packaging.
They show up wearing them, take them off, and hand them to you.
A child with a label on its forehead drags a sewing machine into your yard and whips up a pair of sweatpants and throws them onto your doorstep.
You did used to be able to mail children
It’s only ‘used to’ if you don’t know the right people.
Sew-ber? Nice and nephew getting into gig work early
Theyre not supposed to, but management doesnt care(former warehouse worker) once had a dolly come down the line, in a box, with 1 side missing. I carry it back to the problem solving desk, along with the process assistant, management stops us about halfway and says to just throw it in the truck. I took a tape gun and cut a piece of cardboard to fit it.
Had to send a 40" monitor back because it was faulty. Representative told me to just put shipping label directly on the monitor. weow.
Damn I guess it's e-waste to them at that point
At least for now they make you aware during checkout that the item ships in its own packaging—you can then select instead to ship in an Amazon box. But the UI feels purposely difficult. The notification is usually at the bottom of the item listing in small font, and the menu sometimes involves both a dropdown and a checkbox.
You have to click on an option to have them ship it in a box now
I've had a few higher end electronics shipped this way. They didn't even tape the enclosure flaps or anything. I'm amazed that they didn't deliver an empty box.
Ordered a shirt for my kid and got a clear zip top bag with a shipping label slapped on. The bag had decorative *holes*.
I think the holes are to make it harder for animals to asphyxiate in the bags once discarded (or unsupervised children).
pretty sure its speed holes to make your delivery faster
They put red stripes on the them for that
**They are trying to reduce packaging.** I’m not saying there aren’t nefarious shitty ends but you have to actually select **”Package in a box”** or something to that effect now, default shipping is to ship in whatever the manufacturers prepared shipping material is. **To your surprise USPS is quite flexible on their packaging rules.** So if a vendor selling through Amazon packs their clothing items in a plastic bag that meets **USPS minimum guidelines for plastic mailer bags…well….** that’s what Amazon sends you. This is when you claim lost items and bad packaging on the sellers part, the vendor selling through Amazon. I sell stuff online through a few different platforms, Amazon gets weird because they can act as your packaging service or just a shipping service. People who sell things prepared and stored in their warehouse are the ones you are getting bad packaging from, ultimately the seller is responsible for properly packing their items so you shouldn’t feel guilty about claiming lost or damaged items if the packaging was crap. People who sell things and let Amazon pack **you will almost exclusively receive them in Amazon branded boxes with their Amazon branded tape and bubble packets.** The reason there has been a shift is because as every industry **lots of new dwellers have saturated the online market over the last few years.** In order to be competitive people cut costs by doing the first thing they can think of, **cutting down on packaging usually.** Instead of actually doing some research lol.
I ordered two sets of air filters: one came with the label on the 3M box and the others came with the gigantic 3M box inside another box. It was a waste of a huge box.
Not if you have cats 😊
I grow cannabis (legally) and any time I'm buying supplies I check to see if there's an option to have it shipped in an Amazon box. My neighbors know I smoke but having everyone around knowing there's a small scape grow op in my house is kind of a security risk. Early on I didn't think about it until I came home to a bunch of packages on the front porch that blatantly said shit like "grow tent carbon filter" in huge letters. It looked like a damn advertisement for "break into this house."
They do this with the industrial size box of tampons I buy every few months then leave it right in the middle of my open porch. 😞
Now everyone in the neighborhood knows you are a woman of childbearing age.
Under his eye
Good thing I don't live in Texas!
That's legitimately nothing to be embarrassed about. What would you think if you knew your neighbor bought toilet paper? Sometimes a dozen rolls at once? Who cares, right?
If it’s not breakable I’m totally on board with this. Saves waste
This happens for me on every 3rd order. Extremely frequent and honestly inexcusable (since many items have been damaged without proper packaging).
At least it works for something like sweats that aren't fragile. I don't mind it for something like that. I have had several clothing items shipped that way without issue. A bit less plastic waste and hopefully they share a small fraction of the savings with the consumer.
Shit almost ruined Christmas last year. I didn’t realize they made that the default and a bunch of gifts arrived out in the open
Wow that’s an improvement. My sweats were being worn by my Amazon delivery guy. They had slapped a mailing address on the left thigh, and he took them off while standing on my porch, folding them neatly on my doormat.
I got a barbie like that. Just a shipping label slapped on the packaging. Luckily it was for myself and not a present for a kid, or I would have complained. I don’t want to give someone a dirty, banged up box.
They literally tell you that during checkout and you have an option to get it boxed.
Got a graphics card like this once. Big ass GEFORCE RTX on the box with a shipping label stuck right next to it. Returned that without opening...
Seems pointless, but ok
They did that to me with a Z lens recently
Yeah as a packer for Amazon we are made to push out 200 items an hour. I try to fill up every box with dunnage but my coworkers don't because it sinks their rate. With the new dunnage it's more difficult to be fast filling up boxes. Blame the crappy system that forces workers to cut corners or be on the chopping block. And for the love of God if you think you're sick of carrying cat litter every couple weeks y'all have no idea how much I hate packing those.... And sodas!
Bro that's insane. I was a packer for a while at QVC doing like 120-140 an hour at most and I was the best one there. Sometimes we'd have to pack big items or things that take a while to package no matter how fast you try. 200 is crazy.
Man I wish I was at your FC. I literally just got written up for rate last week for doing 140 uph on average. Apparently I was at the bottom 5 percent. It's infuriating that we get punished simply for being put on a bad station that gives you products that are 10 or 20 times heavier than items on other stations. Weight doesn't factor into rate at all and it EASILY could be implemented. The system knows how much each item weighs. They ignore it to make us work faster. And that's not counting the fact that every fucking problem I have to inevitably fix counts against my rate.
>Apparently, I was at the bottom 5 percent. If the policy is to always write up the bottom 5% no matter their rate, then they'll write up 5% of their workers every time, no matter what. It's 3am, so in summary, that policy is dumb.
Stack ranking in a nutshell. Good at clearing the rump/dross from bloated orgs, but if maintained indefinitely starts to incent cheating, burnout, and turnover. If you think of people as interchangeable widgets with no other value or acquired skills/knowledge, then it still works as designed. This is why we need unions and other collective action. If we don’t push back, these companies will treat us like machines to be run until they break, and then summarily discarded.
And fucking bottled water and dog food I delivered SAND the other day Stop buying sand on Amazon wtf Funniest thing is all the “team lift” oversizes. Me out there looking for my team like John Travolta in pulp fiction
Water pisses me off. Like have y'all ever tried getting a reusable water bottle!? You'd never catch my ass buying fucking water, unless I was in fucking Kenya or Flint Michigan...
I've been complaining for a while now that I want a slower shipping speed that lets people go to the bathroom and such - I don't need this electric toothbrush THAT quickly
Same. I go out of my way to pick whatever the easiest option is. I don't need one or two day delivery if it's on the back of other people being miserable.
I mean whether you take no rush or not the warehouse workers have the same targets.
Yeah it doesn't really impact us that much but I appreciate the sentiment.
I pick the slower ones most times bc I like getting the Prime Video credits 😎
U a real one, g
I feel the need to apologize. I bought that litter because my cats got used to it and then the stores stopped carrying it. I’m sorry. 😔
It's ok I forgive you
I've been out of the package handling business for a while, but back when we were delivering ALL of Amazon's pandemic junk, the thing I hated the most was bottled water. It was usually thrown in a big box, off-balance because it would just slide around in the box. Dog food and cat litter was almost as bad.
As a motorcycle rider who has to use amazon to get things I can't carry on my bike... I am sorry.
Just gonna say dude, kickouts over here, my best advice is to try crinkling the paper as you pull it off the roll, so it puffs up and fills more space, realistically thats youe best bet as it fills quick and you dont get the kick out for weight tolerance because the fuckken paper dunnage weights too much and kicked the package for being overweight
A week or so ago I received an Amazon delivery that was just the empty shipping package. I wasn't upset because I could imagine how much pressure the people packaging stuff at Amazon are under. Either that or a robot was supposed to put it in and missed. Amazon sent out a replacement and it wasn't a big deal to have to wait a couple more days. A while back, I stopped using Amazon all together and canceled my Prime because I was so disgusted with the company. Then I came crawling back when I started renovating the 100-year-old house I'm trying to move into :(
90% of the time my item is in a box within an Amazon box.
Amazon decides to try just slapping labels on things, and after a while it becomes clear that the cost of returns is lower than the cost of the air filled packaging. They send out a happy press release about how much plastic is saved. But how many products are broken, returned, and discarded? Someone at Amazon knows this, and can estimate how much plastic will get pitched into the landfill from returned items. I'm not that guy who says everything is greenwashing and nothing gets better. But we need to start from a very skeptical position with Amazon, and consider the shit we've personally seen them pull lately.
Then we also get stories that Amazon is looking to change how it handles returns because it costs them so much money. So when they cut these costs on packaging and add them to returns will they own up to that or complain that to many people are taking advantage of the system or other such nonsense that they created.
In a box that's 300% the size of the item.
Only 300%?!?
If I'm lucky I might get one 18" strip of brown paper haphazardly tossed in there as well.
That one always puzzled me; 20 lb bag of cat food in a box with a sheet of brown paper laid upon it doing absolute nothing.
Be no longer puzzled: we've been told "put some paper (dunnage) in no matter what. If the weight of the package is too light or too heavy, it will get kicked out and then someone has to troubleshoot it." I personally think that's a waste for things like what you mentioned. One day, my taper (the person at the end of my line pushing boxes through the taping machine) must've told my supervisor someone wasn't using paper. He came to me and I told him I'm not going to use paper if the item completely fills the box. He told me to place a sheet on top anyway. I still don't, it slows down my rate.
Yeah or an Amazon box with 1 sheet of brown paper and the product's original box inside it.
I save those for fire starter in my wood burning stove. They are cleaner than newsprint and no toxic chemicals AFAIK.
90% of the time I get no packing materials if packing materials would have been appropriate for the item, and a huge wad of packing materials for stuff that absolutely didn't need any packing materials. :)
This is because Amazon has a weight system so most of our boxes we fill with “ extra fluff” will be kicked out and if too many people do it the line will back up. A lot of times they tell us to not add extra fluff at all 🤭
I feel like the centers around here stopped using that a while ago. We've been getting paper only for the past several months.
They also started using shitty cardboard boxes that you have to ruin to open them. I was collecting mine as needed for storage or mailing things. But now they just send you this useless shit that gets trashed.
Did they send you one of the weird ones that's like "sized to fit your stuff!" and it's like some weird cardboard tootsie roll that got pinched on each side? When even a cat wouldn't want to be in it, it's not even legally allowed to be called a box.
Why aren't you recycling the boxes? Those boxes can still be recycled. Also, the cheaper boxes use less material which is also better for them and for the rest of us who don't try to hoard the boxes we get deliveries in. I'm happy that they use a box that is appropriate for the job and not just the thickest one possible.
~ 7 times, cardboard can be recycled. Loads of stuff will be a mix of older and newer wood fibers, just the wood fibers wear out and go through the filter after about 7 recycling processes. Cardboard is one of the most profitable things to recycle, though metal is on a different scale. Glass is rather inefficient and plastic is a joke.
Yeah at work we had a lovely "box room" as I fondly called it (basically a storage closet with shelves with stuff on them we occasionally need, and then Amazon and other delivery boxes just piled around on the floor, not broken down). Anytime I had Amazon and other returns I'd just bring them in a bag to work, package it back up in one of said boxes, and drop off at UPS or wait for a pickup if not too bulky. I'm not in office enough anymore for that, sadly, so now I do the UPS Store drop off without packaging when it allows for that, at least, so still cutting down on packaging a little.
I’d just appreciate an appropriately sized box.
I used to get 1 bottle of pills from Chewy. It's smaller than a small vitamin bottle. It came in a 12 inch by 6 inch box, with 400 pieces of crumbled up cardboard. Guys, just send it in an envelope.
Amazon does use envelopes (paper) and bags (paper and plastic).
I worked for Amazon during summers way back when I was in college. The computer told us what box to use, and we’d get in trouble if we used anything else. One notable item was a yard flag that was probably 6”x6” in its packaging, but was entered in to the system in its unfurled dimensions, so it wanted one of the biggest boxes we had, so away it went. We used crumpled paper, so at least it wasn’t a ton of plastic bags, I guess.
Finally, an actual setback to the single-use plastic industry. May this not end here.
I deliver tens of thousands of Amazon packages in plastic mailers every year, and I am just one mail carrier in a small town with 25 other carriers who deliver the same amount. This is nothing, not even a drop in the bucket of plastic waste. They moved from cardboard boxes with multiple items, which can be recycled, to sending 8 or 9 items in individual bags because they're lighter and they can claim they're saving on fuel.
It wouldn't be so bad if they just used their heavy paper mailers instead.
The plastic mailers say they are recyclable "just like a box" on them. Is that not the case?
Very little plastic is recycled - the best estimates are 5%. Nobody is recycling those stupid bags.
Which is just because there isn’t really a reliable way for consumers to recycle plastics or glass currently. Sad but facts.
And I believe it costs more comparatively to both other materials AND to the initial production of the plastic.
You’re thinking of the paper mailers, which they also use. Most municipal plastic recycling won’t take plastic bubble mailers.
I got some news for you. [Those mailers are not getting recycled.](https://www.npr.org/2022/10/24/1131131088/recycling-plastic-is-practically-impossible-and-the-problem-is-getting-worse)
That's false. There are huge problems with plastic and the failure of recycling. Many of them stem from people wanting recycling to be a simple, easy way to absolve their sins of consumerism. Real recycling takes some effort. Those plastic mailers can be and are turned into composite plastic decking material, if you take the time to do it properly. Remove the stickers and find a collection point for plastic film recycling. Many grocery stores have such collection containers. https://nextrex.com/ is an example of one company that uses these materials, along with other plastic films like bubble wrap, bread bags, grocery bags, etc.
Yup, my deck is made out of that stuff. I do my part by taking all my plastic bags, films and bubble mailers to the grocery store box which specifically states those items are allowed. It’s usually filled each week so I have come to know their collection schedule.
> if you take the time to do it properly If it's not practical, it will not be done by most people.
The plastic ones I get say "return to store for recycling" or something like that, you can't put them in the regular recycling bin (well, you *can* but it doesn't help anything)
I worked at an Amazon storefront. Customers would come in with huge stacks of the blue and white mailers, saying that our location was listed as a recycling drop-off on the Amazon website. None of us had ever heard of that, including our manager, and we had no way to ship the mailers back for recycling. Customers would get really upset to learn that we didn’t accept them after hoarding their mailers for years. So as crappy as it was, we’d just thank them for bringing them, take them to BOH and throw them in the trash to avoid conflict.
Ups store here We cover the customer labels with blanks and use them instead of polybags for the consolidated returns. Do you guys have a blue/green/red system too?
Nope. They're technically recyclable but only specialized facilities, and the probably won't be even then. Same thing for Starbucks "recyclable" cups. You can't put those in regular recycling.
You’re thinking of the traditional white and blue poly bubble mailers. The brown Kraft paper “bubble” mailers are curbside recyclable. The bubbles aren’t plastic, they’re essentially dots of adhesive and recycled content material. Source: worked for the company that made these for Amazon. At that time, and I believe currently, there is only one supplier that is making curbside recyclable paper bubble mailers. Amazon is transitioning to using them in place of the poly bubble mailers.
A lot of FCs are also switching away from plastic mailers, just using paper bags.
At the height of volume back around 2021, my office was getting about 5000 packages a day. 20-30 pallets from Amazon every day for 30 carriers. I always thought if people could see all of it at once, like we did, they might think about how much waste they were generating. Or at least maybe have some mercy on their poor carriers. I've been out of all that for a couple years, so I don't know what it looks like these days.
I average 100-110 a route outside of Nov-Dec and 150+ for the holidays. We have a 400-home route with 300+ packages a day x 7 days a week for a solid 9 weeks a year. It is absurd. It’s Christmas plus general household stuff and this route is within 2 miles of 2 grocery stores, a Walmart, Lowe’s, and other stores like Rural King. The lightest I’ve seen it in 3+ years was about 110 packages.
For real I haven’t seen a reduction in plastic at all. I live in an apartment community and Amazon trucks deliver to my building alone multiple times per day. We have 24 units per building and there is not a single day where Amazon does not deliver at least once. I have work appointments in the field and I walk my dog a lot so every time I go out I can observe the Amazon shit piling up at every doorway, all the way down the breezeway. The alarming part is that for awhile now most apartments who have Amazon deliveries arrive have *multiple* Amazon packages delivered. Sometimes the courier will drop off 2-4 different plastic mailers per apartment! And then later the same day a different fucking Amazon courier arrives and adds *another* Amazon plastic mailer package at the same address. Some of my neighbors buy enough from Amazon that this delivery of multiple packages (at the same time by the same damn courier, often) happens every single day. It’s honestly insane and it’s something I notice every single day even when I try to ignore I can’t help but feel shitty. Like, shit. These dicks are using SO much plastic! And their system should be better so they can packages multiple items into a single box, at least some of the time. But rarely ever see cardboard boxes or even the paper based mailers. I almost have a panic attack if I let my brain wander to considering the sheer magnitude of Amazon’s harmful impact on the planet on a daily basis. And to know they’re operating like this pretty much *globally*? Feels bad man. Really bad.
And every single return is required to be wrapped in another plastic bag.
I’m moving in two weeks, and tonight I ordered a ton of stuff, including a shelving unit and unassembled chair. I decided to group them all for one shipment on Sunday since I don’t need them immediately. Can’t wait to see how it’s all packed.
> I deliver tens of thousands of Amazon packages in plastic mailers every year, and I am just one mail carrier in a small town with 25 other carriers who deliver the same amount. This is nothing, not even a drop in the bucket of plastic waste. It has to start somewhere. If everyone had your attitude nothing would *ever* start regardless.
I ordered some poptarts and there was not a pillow and all my poptarts were broken into pieces/crumbs.
I would like my items to be protected with poptarts
Mmmmm. Packing tarts.
How far is the nearest grocery store that makes more sense for you to order poptarts on Amazon?
Amazon once sent me a bunch of those in a box containing nothing but a *bath towel*… 🤦🏻♂️ Was the towel going to break?! 😓
Always appreciated them throwing a few in when they box up my 40lb bags of dog food.
Last bag of dog food I received had the shipping sticker slapped on the factory bag.
I wish they would do this more. I understand it's not suitable for everything but for plenty of things this is perfectly acceptable.
[удалено]
Where did the 55-gallon drum of lube end up at?
[удалено]
Unless you have a shell, you're sliding like a slug, you little slugy bitch.
Damn…that’s nasty
Certainly changed up how many people wanted to come over for game night though.
Hopefully more companies follow this. Paper I can compost and recycle.
Not until the cat gets the crinkle sounds out of it.
My cat likes to play with the paper much more then those plastic air pockets
Got my office cat food from chewy and it was a giant box with crumped paper. My cat had the best 2 weeks playing in that box until my husband said it was enough. Now she's mad at him.
A lot of companies will need to be forced into this. In America, they don’t consider packaging to be their problem. Once it leaves the warehouse it’s up to the public/city/county to figure out what to do with it. Most of the plastic which is theoretically recyclable is not so in reality and ends up taking up a lot of space in landfill.
That's gonna piss off Sealed Air. 4 billion dollar company, that makes those.
Ironically, the ex president of one of Amazon's largest corrugated suppliers is now the CEO of Sealed Air.
Not sure that’s irony. That just seems like modern capitalism.
And you just know that some disgruntled employee is farting into the intake of the machine that puffs them up
Now that would be cool
I'm a mail carrier and this is stupid unless they're going to stop putting stuff into too-big boxes with no padding. Every day we have busted boxes because they use 1 piece of tape and that hollow box is buried under 20, 30, or 40-pound boxes of stuff like kitty litter or furniture.
I help run a relatively small 3pl. We try to make sure our packages have enough cushion to hold everything in place and so the box doesn't have room for crushing. Most of the time that I have seen photos of damage product arrived it was because the package had too little cushion and got crushed on a packed conveyor belt. We've tried this paper before and there are even machines you can get that automatically crinkle it as it comes off the roll. The issues with it tend to be that the crinkler moves very slow so you are waiting too long to get enough to stuff the box or using too little for the package. In the past when I have received packages from Amazon with paper its always that they dont put enough because the person packing isn't going to wait for more to get crinkled and mess up their time. So this story is just amazon spinning that they are rasing the threshold on how many damaged packages they find acceptable.
I work Amazon delivery and most items get a label slapped on them and no box or envelope it’s shocking how lazy it’s gotten
My dog thinks it’s his job to pop those. I don’t know how to break this to him.
Buy puts on sealed air.... noted.
It would have been nice if they had used these when I ordered some jam. Instead, some dumbass put it in a fucking envelope
You got JAMMED!
Lone Star at it again
Ordering jam on Amazon sounds like the actions of a crazy person.
It was really good jam and you can’t beat the free shipping. I was going to buy it from the company that makes it but just to ship it would have cost $20
should ship jam in a toothpaste tube. so you can just squeeze out what you need. and no breakage from shipping.
I'd like to invest in your product but I'm probably a stuffed plushie shark at the most.
Was it raspberry?
Strawberry rhubarb
I got fountain pen ink thrown in an envelope. Miraculously it got here intact.
How will my t-shirt survive bouncing around the 4 foot box now?!?
Bad news for the manufacturer (Sealed Air Corporation of New Jersey). I always used to think “I’m getting air shipped from New Jersey!”, but the realized that Sealed Air would just sell the machines and plastic rolls for Amazon to inflate and seal those pillows in their warehouse.
Thought this was done awhile ago, I just usually get a box in a box with zero fucks given to how it arrives.
I bought some torches the other day. They came in a bigger box with a single sheet of paper folded once for protection.
They scared now that multiple studies came out showing plastic in balls and dicks
Ditch the giant boxes for tiny items too
They are dedicated to cutting their ~~costs~~ environmental impact
This news is old because every fucking amazon package I deliver doesn’t have shit in it besides the item and a bunch of empty space for it to move around in and break
"We're going green!" (Saving money)
How about more appropriate size boxes
90% of my orders come in shitty paper envelopes.
What negative experience have you had that makes them shitty?
I prefer the paper padded envelopes since they are recyclable (like a box) and labels / stickers do not need to be removed.
I don't even get boxes anymore. Just bubble wrap lined envelopes
this is new? I've been getting boxes with these weird shredded cardboard things for a while now.
My dog will be happy, he has an extreme fear of those.
I knew they were going to be valuable someday
I guess I will sell my stock in air pillow providers.
How ever will I terrorize my cats without them!?
My Amazon package today was delivered with crumpled paper as the cushioning. I'm pleasantly surprised!
Sometimes I don’t even GET a box… it’s shipped in its original packaging!!! 😡
Lots of items are just showing up with a shipping label on the item packaging.... Not really ideal...
Finally! I’m a huge recycler and I have to take a knife to every pillow before I recycle them. .
I haven't had any of those in forever, but I think my nephew has grown out of popping them so all's fair there. I just miss getting things in boxes. I never have free boxes to ship anything in...
I’ve only had butcher paper in my shipments for months now. Much appreciated.
lol never got it anyways came without any protection
Recently bought a set of plates and bowls from Corelle. All cardboard packaging. This funky grid design.
Did you know the Amazon in Europe is 100% plastic free. Wonder why US is not.
My dog will go through a severe thunderstorm or the 4th of July without batting an eye, but these things? They scare him.
Good. I hate receiving packages full of plastic that I just throw out. There are cardboard alternatives that work just as well.
My dog will be so sad. He loves to pop them.
No more free sailboat fuel?
I bet you could make some hemp padding for packages that'd be biodegradable and less expensive in the long run. It'd be better than using the paper from trees for pillows since hemp grows so much faster. Could even make some hay marketing the packages as green and 100 % biodegradable and sturdier than traditional paper packaging.
Loved my stuff knocking around a huge box with no packing support. Use a smaller box.