Leading the stupid shipping gang takes creative incompetence, and Hewlett-Packard is clearly up to the task. Other companies might have turned to email when faced with the challenge of shipping sixteen software licenses. Not Hewlett-Packard! HP went looking for a box. A really big box, which they filled with sixteen smaller boxes, each containing two precious pieces of paper ensconced in a layer of protective foam.
Hewlett-Packard’s head of product packaging was unable to explain the odd shipping choice, as he is currently en route to St. Ives.
HP shatters excessive packaging world record [The Register]
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Huh. I’m sure the people packing this thought it was just as dumb.
I can’t see how any shipping group would do something this stupid, especailly at HP where getting it out there faster is of a higher priority. I think they’d be more likely to just send out two boxes.
Then again, CDW charged us $150 overnight shipping for a Sun power cable for a server we ordered… and the server hasn’t even shipped yet. Instead of shipping it with the server, they gave us a $150 overnight UPS bill for a single server power cable.
So maybe I can believe it.
Someone should let HP know about the bubble envelopes.
I just got a plastic earloop, which is TINY, from Motorola in a box that is 12X12X10.
My wife and I both got quite a laugh out of that.
Had they shipped it in an envelope it would have been sufficient.
@jst07: Or carrier pigeons.
This must be why HP can’t return their customer’s computers – they’ve obviously run out of boxes.
[consumerist.com]
Something is going on here and this one is the smoking gun. But what is it? A retard would not have been able to pull this off, but a high functioning autistic person would. So if they’re not the latter, then there IS a conspiracy of some kind. Any theories?
I work for IT at my University and we received the licenses for 1400 UMPCs that were ordered for all our campuses. These were individually shipped in an envelope each. each had 3 sheets of paper. Why didnt we just get 7 reams no one knows.
Only someone with a PhD could create a system this bad.
Maybe they ran out of envelopes???
I just took one look at this article and ROTFLAMOed off my bed. Now everytime shall thing of or hear the name HP or Hewlett Packard i will giggle, people are gonna think im nuts. then ill tell them of this article, then they will think HP is nuts.
@Zeniq: I’m not too certain of this. Have you ever seen a shipping facility? Not everything is Lucy and Ethel making Bonbons on the conveyor, believe you me.
Anyway, it absolutely, positively kills me that people do this.
To think, Native Americans used stress about using the whole buffalo (I really don’t know that; I just pulled it out of my ass because it sounded profound).
(Wannabe profound, rather.)
(Bloody hell.)
Maybe someone at HP is just having a bit of fun here.
@Gilbert: Geez, I’ve run a shipping facility, my VP would’ve had my head with various sauces and garnish were I to allow this. I can only hope this is a result of somebody breaking the No Alcohol at Lunch rule, or just having a bit of fun.
A computer illiterate friend of mine is asking for a recommendation on what laptop to buy. Hmmm – how to answer . . .
@zumdish: I stand corrected. Sort of.
That said, if your friend does indeed buy an HP, at the very least he can retrofit his ebay business with all the shipping materials he’ll ever need.
Ever.
As someone who works in the transportation industry, I totally get wanting to protect whatever it is you’re shipping as a lot of people are quite frankly not to bright. However an envelope or Tyvek Pak, or a combination of envelope in Tyvek pak would’ve been much better. Most companies charge by volume and wt, as a result an envelope is almost a flat rate.
The explanation is pretty straightforward…
HP obviously stores their license documents as products, each with an individual box, in their warehouse. It’s an item on a shelf, with a barcode, that gets picked and dropped onto a conveyor. You can’t do that with a piece of paper.
Then, if a customer orders a computer and needs a license, they just pull the computer’s box and the license box, and stick them in a packing box, and they are done. No opening, no checking, no taping, no mess. Of course, it gets messed up if you order 16 of them, but at the same time, it’s probably cheaper to do it this way than to have someone pick and pack by hand.
I think people commenting on this stuff and posting to the Consumerist really don’t have a sense of how large and automated this process is…
Anyone who is interested, take 20 minutes and read the Anandtech visit to Newegg.com’s warehouse – [www.anandtech.com]
It’s an illuminating read.
This isn’t even the first time I’ve seen this practice. Back when I was in school 10 years ago, we ordered licenses for windows 98 for a computer lab (50ish). Each one came in it’s own box. All of those boxes were in their own box, and all of those boxes were together in one big box. All of the licenses were bubble wrapped, and there were packing peanuts in the big box.
And here i thought it was an isolated incident.
I think what’s worse is that somebody had to actually tape 2 boxes together to make it all work… wow…
@lchatburn:
QFT
The problem is not that HP sent 17 separate licenses, but that the OP ordered 17 individual licenses. Why not order a volume license? Or, you know, pay for the volume license edition, so you wouldn’t need 17 separate license codes.
@donkeyjote: Don’t blame the guy who ordered them. I’m sure there’s a reason he ordered 17 separate licenses, and HP should know better than to package them this way.
@lchatburn: It may be cheaper in terms of labor, but I guarantee you the shipping cost on that monstrosity is insanely high compared to one small envelope to hold the sheets of paper.
So yeah, you’ve puzzled out how it happened (not that rough), but it’s still pretty indefensible.
In these days of $4+ gas and increasing scarcity of lumber, etc, I think we can all agree a little less waste would be a good thing.
This is disappointing. I bought HP’s EX470 home server a couple of months ago. The ups packaging was exactly the same size as the retail box. Sure this was probably designed to fit exactly, but it was nice that I didn’t have even more packaging to discard.
That is the problem when software replaces people who can notice silly things going on. There would have been a person at the shipping department who would say, look, these are all going to the same address, and are ludicrously overpacked, let’s consolidate them all and also not use huge boxes. Now, the drones doing the shipping are not allowed any judgment because the software says what they do. People who write supply chain codes, or any other code, need to think about the various things that people notice that software will not, or may catch during the course of their job, and tell you about when they fix, so that these sorts of inefficiencies and bad headlines don’t have to continue.
@lchatburn:
To the voice of reasonable explanation, Thank you.
I usually get irritated at the self righteous “stupid shipping gang” articles, but I’ve got to agree with you guys on this one. This is hilariously, incomprehensibly stupid.
I see this quite often at work (next time I’ll take a picture). Office Depot once shipped a tiny box of pencils (all by itself with a bunch of bubble wrap) in a box around 12x12x12 because it came at a different time than the rest of the order. Sometimes they ship our HP inkjet cartridges in big boxes with bubble wrap; sometimes in plastic envelope-paks. I think it depends on the warehouse.
Someone has GOT to get a handle on shipping waste. Conservation should be everyone’s business. Why can’t a real person evaluate shipping procedures & flag those that are obviously, overwhelmingly RIDICULOUS (as with the software licenses)? Doesn’t common sense have a place anywhere anymore?
Hewlett-Packard hates Bambi.
That is all.
@lchatburn: But doesn’t putting those licenses in a box take someone to pack them originally? The idea makes sense, yes, but it doesn’t seem to cut down on much work. Nevermind using a smaller box with no padding, or god forbid an envelope.
@PatrickIs2Smart: You’d think they’d get the idea that something was up when they had a box the size of a child that weighed about two pounds, tops. Could it have really been cheaper to ship that oversized monstrosity than two smaller boxes?
Wow. I was going to send in a package that Lenovo sent me, but this wins.
I’m awestruck.
The problem with consolidating is that that’s a Stupid Labor Gang–paying packers who can normally process X number of shipments per hour to pry open sixteen boxes, pull paper out of them, find the relevant package, and repackage them. Standardization means either there’s stupid visible at our end or stupid that’s not, and I bet it’s cheaper to pay for a big empty box than a big full person.
@lchatburn: You couldn’t store licenses in envelopes with the same barcodes affixed to them? I think thick envelopes would have no trouble on a conveyor system.
I see this at work all the time. Thing is, if I took a picture of it, and work found out about it, I’d get canned.
Well, none of this surprises me, even if it is some sort of automation oversight. I ordered a printer directly from the HP website. It arrived on my doorstep just fine. Yup, everyone who drove by my house knew I bought a printer, including the guy who delivered it. It came in it’s original store packaging. They just stuck a shipping label on it and mailed it to me. I’m just glad I got home in time before someone was tempted to take it. Geez, you could see what model printer it was from the street. Ugh.
They’ve definitely got issues with product packaging.
Out of all the previous stories about wasteful shipping techniques I’m stunned by this particular story. I mean, WOW.
@lchatburn: I read that article all the way through, and the part that I think is most relevant to this is where the author describes how the item gets from shelf to tote (to package). There is absolutely no reason it couldn’t be done with an envelope. A person picks the item up off the shelf; thus there’s no problem with, say, a mechanical claw of some kind having trouble with a thin little envelope. Then the item goes into a little tub for its trip around the conveyor belt — again, something that an envelope would suffice for.
Now, it’s entirely possible that HP’s system is different from NewEgg’s. But the article you cite as an illumination into warehouse automation makes the case that this instance of stupid shipping didn’t have to happen. NewEgg’s process appears to be reliant upon human beings except for making and taping boxes, controlling the flow of totes around the warehouse, and telling the tote jockeys what to take off the shelves.
Of course, I think that shipping in general (stupid or no) didn’t have to happen in this case. Why couldn’t HP have sent 16 PDF versions of the license via email?
Maybe they did this to show the importance of the software licenses. Some software licenses are really expensive and if they were tossed in a normal envelope they might get lost on someones desk. They might have done that to just show that its an actual product to whoever is in the IT department. I don’t think its that odd that they shipped them in bigger packaging, maybe this big is a little overboard but it is smarter than just tossing them in a regular envelope.
@mikemar42: That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve heard today. I can assure you that HP didn’t package 32 sheets of paper in 17 boxes because software licenses can get lost on some slob IT geek’s desk.
For those of you arguing the standardized prepacked-box theory: So it would completely wreck their supply chain to have 5 or 10 packs of licenses as a separate type of box?
If this OP got a 10 pack in wasteful boxing, and a 5 pack in wasteful boxing, and a single in wasteful boxing, I think the odds are they wouldn’t have even written, or if they had consumerist wouldn’t have bothered posting.
How much were those licenses? If they cost a lot I can easily understand individual packaging. You do not want to merge them all together and have the customer complaining they did not receive one of the licenses because they couldn’t find in the huge stack of paper. Unfortunately, this kind of package is very necessary from a business stand point. At least they shipped them together in one box.
The license papers I have see usually have something that indicates who owns it like the company name.
Also what product coming from HP that needs license.
@midwestkel: Thinclients.
@midwestkel: @donkeyjote:
Sorry, got cut off. Thinclients, fat clients (Regular corporate computers) and the servers that love them.
[h18000.www1.hp.com]
[h18004.www1.hp.com]
If they are dumb enough to ship this way, maybe they’re dumb enough to pay an insurance claim saying that the contents were broken in shipping.
I’ve got to go rewind my DVD now so that the rental store doesn’t charge me an extra dollar.
Oh this is nothing.
We needed a crap-ton of power cords at work. we had a run of HP server orders that came with standard plugs and we need hooded plugs.
Purchasing had to haggle with them on a price for the power cords because it wasn’t really an item they sold. they settled on the cost of a Penny each. now note that HP wasn’t going to charge but Purchasing insisted on paying “something”
So the order goes in for about 3500 power cords. we figure they will come in a big box.
well, they did.
several in fact.
One cord in each box packaged much like the licenses mentioned in this article.
Each cord was nicely twist tied, with anti-static foam separating the cord from a piece of paper warning us about the dangers of electric shock or something.
3500 little boxes. all packed in several bigger boxes.
3500 little boxes. all packed in several bigger boxes.
3500 little boxes. all packed in several bigger boxes.
3500 little boxes. all packed in several bigger boxes.
/well you get the idea
you gotta start giving an award for this.
say a gold sprayed box…in a box..in a box.
@lchatburn: Assuming your explanation is correct, I can see two problems. 1) A box even as big as the one holding the individual license still seems excessive, especially if you have to send even as few as two or three licenses to the same person, which can’t be that uncommon. 2) This guy needed 17 licenses. If it’s really unusual for someone to need that many, I think it would probably not be a waste of time/money for the employee to open the boxes and consolidate them for this special case, given how much more the shipping costs must have been (and how long would that really take? Maybe five minutes?). If it’s NOT especially unusual, the system should be set up to accomodate such a case; the suggestion that someone else made that there be five-pack and ten-packs of licenses available makes a lot of sense to me.
@RDProgrammer: I did a summer job where one day I had to stuff envelopes with Purchase Orders. I was told explicitly by the accounts clerk to put one order per envelope. When I asked the obvious, she said “Because I used to do that until I screwed up and put two similar POs to two competing vendors in one envelope, and vendor x made an issue of us buying from vendor y. Afterwards I was told ‘one PO, one envelope’ by upper management”.
The sheets must have been made from endangered white rhino hide or something
Ok maybe I’m just not getting it. Why are these not available as an attachment in an email? If they are just printed on ‘normal’ paper, no special bits and bobs needed, then why package and send them at all? That would be the ultimate cost saving measure. Let the client print their own and save on shipping/packaging. Can someone enlighten me on this?
wow. hp not only makes crap computers – with all that brainpower they can’t even figure out how to email a license, or put it up on a website to view.
Nice work, Fiorini. Hope your work with McCain is just as useful as your stint at HP.