Dear Staples:
Thanks for your recent delivery of the items we ordered. Your drivers must know how to drive fast because it always arrives very fast and we think that’s swell. However, your shipping department might be drinking on the job or something because the amount of packaging used for our most recent order was ridiculous. You might want to go down there and check.
Here is the major malfunction:
The shipment was prepared such that each of the…
Item Number: 708146 –
Ampad Gold Fibre® Designer Series Top Wirebound Writing Pad, Brown, Wide Ruled, 8 1/2? x 11 3/4?
Quantity: 5 Price: $3.58..that I ordered was packaged and shipped in a separate box. Are you kidding me? Its just too much for me to bear! In addition to being very un-environmental, shipping one NOTEBOOK in a box that measures 2 feet by 1 foot 2 inches is costly, perhaps costing US more money and YOU for certain. We dont pay you for shipping, so it’s not like it was a clever ruse to squeeze more money from this cash cow.
I am speechless! SEE attached photos of the carnage from ALL the packaging from the delivery. I ordered 41, no wait, 38 items from you and they were shipped in 8 different boxes, most of which I could fit in! And I am not a dwarf OR a child. Actually, 1 item is backordered so 37 items shipped. The other 3 items were catalogs that I have requested NOT to have delivered since I do all my ordering ONLINE. That’s 4.625 items per box. And the “items” were things like “pens” and “highlighters” not “Hummer engines” or “flat screen tv’s.” Is this some kind of joke? If so, it’s not funny Staples, not funny. Most of the items could have fit in one box. Didn’t YOU see An Inconvenient Truth like the rest of America?
Above: Large mess cleaned up by ME, not staples.My Account Manager has been the most helpful and enthusiastic customer representative I have ever had the pleasure to interact with, but the firestorm-a-brewing right now may be enough to have cost you a customer. Silly Staples.
The amount of time I spent breaking down boxes and properly discarding those “plastic bubbles” used to cushion each individually boxed notebook was ridiculous. You have wasted my time Staples.
And I am very, very upset.
The stupid shipping gang is a menace to the environment. Bubblewrap makers gaze dreamily as Walmart, Crate & Barrel, and Staples strike fear into the hearts of forests everywhere. Does an insider want to let us know how these packaging nightmares, which are a waste to everyone but the shipping companies, make it out the door?
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@TheDude06: You’re mostly right, but it’s also a reflection of the non-topics that are becoming more frequent on the site. There’s really nothing intelligent to be said about Staples using extra boxes to ship an order.
@weakdome:
Agreed, OP needs to STFU.
@TheDude06: Amen, I second this.
@DAK: Large corporations wiping their metaphorical asses with the environment isn’t relevant to consumerism, eh? Good for YOU not caring about it, but there’s plenty “intelligent” to be said here. Too bad that 7 / 50 comments here (better than 10%) are blatantly criticizing the OP for daring to complain about corporate waste, while another 10+ are dealing with some lunatic trying to disprove global warming.
Honestly, I still enjoy reading The Consumerist most of the time…as long as I don’t read the comments.
@Toof_75_75: Your first link is a blog containing the opinions of a single scientist, your second is a misinterpretation of a misinterpretation of scientific data, and your third is a book written by a PR expert and a journalist. All of your sources are more political than scientific.
Perhaps you’re unfamiliar with what it means for a theory to have a scientific majority, but pointing to individual scientists who disagree with it does not make it false.
@Toof_75_75: Also, I find the fact that you get your science information from political websites to be very troubling.
If you are concerned with discovering what the facts are, rather than with having your opinions confirmed, you need to seek out other sources of information.
I remember hearing on NPR a few weeks back that the cardboard industry in America is doing really well, and that’s usually a good indicator for how well the economy is doing.
But if major shipping companies like Amazon and Staples are grossly inflating their use of cardboard with, to be blunt, idiotic shipping methods, I wonder how accurate the report was.
Is “cardboard inflation” going to affect how economists look at the state of our nation’s economy?
The problem most likely resulted from their system’s carton selection logic. Most likely the dimensions for the notepads had been incorrectly entered. The employee fulfilling the separate pick tickets – putting one notepad into one box had no way of knowing about the other boxes. The five different shipments could have been picket by different people at different times. The distribution center that shipped out the order could be filling anywhere from 1,000 to 50,000 shipments a day. Another reason shipments end up in large cartons is due to a lack of small cartons to select – the carton selection logic may have picket the smallest box for the order. The real problem is there may not be enough small carton sizes for all the possible combinations of items a customer might order at the same time. A company like Staples would be selling a wide variety of items as small as a pencil to as large as a file cabinet. It is also easier to use a carton that is too big than it is to solve the problem of a carton that can not be used because it is too small.
For some part, smallparcellog is right. But after working at Staples for awhile, I can safely say that orders are broken down piece by piece, in case your order has to come from more than one warehouse. This keeps the employees from playing the “telephone game” to track down all the parts of a full order before packing it into just one box, where your order would most definitely be screwed up.
If you are really concerned about keeping green, you could always return the boxes to your local staples the next time you drop by. We would love to have them to send out orders placed between stores.
how come nobody gets this right ? if they ship product in envelopes or million things in one box product gets smashed and it does more damage to our planet to Staples and its customers most people think product is delivered from stores wrong it gets shipped out from many different warehouses changes few trucks and goes from place to place in matter of not days but minutes I have worked in industry and I also know that Staples asks every customer to consolidate orders in order to save money waste and many other things ! Also there is laws about shipping you cant put window cleaner and pencils in same box its illegal certain products have to be in same box some products can never be in same box so next time your windex arrives in separate box don’t blame retailer blame law fro protecting you )))
Sorry for my English )