Amazon JUST made the Naughty List

That's hilarious. I usually send gifts to a near-by relative to have them wrap and deliver if I can't be there myself.

It looks like someone got lazy and reused the box the books were sent to Amazon in, thus defeating the purpose of the gift wrapping.

This kind of packaging is commonly seen with street dated merchandise.

Screw with the kid, don't give it to him in the morning, then give it a few hours later/that night...

I think the idea is that you take it out of the other box before putting it under the tree. If they didn't label the boxes gift wrapped items came in then how would you identify which is which? I mean if you ordered 10 books as gifts and they all arrived wrapped in 1 box form amazon I suspect you would be more pissed. Admittedly the shipping box doesn't need to have that information on it, but since it seems apparent that this is the box that the manufacturer supplied for shipping the item I can't say that Amazon really messed up that badly.

@frieze: Yeah, while I guess it's a little unusual to ship the item in a box labeled with the book name, I definitely wouldn't blame Amazon here. Also, you could identify the wrapped book based on the included invoice, assuming they didn't ship multiple wrapped books in the same box.

@frieze:

I agree. It is just unfortunate they used the original box.

@frieze: taking it out of the box only works if the person doesn't live with you and get to the mailbox/ front porch 1st.

I too ordered this gift wrapped. I contacted Amazon immediately and they refunded the price. I was still pissed at them for doing it, though.

All of the Harry Potter series comes in this type of boxes when ordered. It's not amazon's fault.

This is partly why I have everything sent to my house first, then re-send it to the recipient. Expensive and time-consuming, but at least I know the wrapping is done right.

Looks like they need to update procedure. I'm assuming someone hand gift wrapped it. Which means they had the opportunity to place permanent blank stickers over the identifying information. Amazon hopefully will correct this glitch in their gift wrapping system.

@frieze: It's called a packing list...

That's as bad as when I order a gift for someone and have it shipped to them directly and check off the "do not put an invoice in this package" box or write down "do not include an invoice or bill with package because it is a GIFT" note under order comments, and they still do it anyway. -_-; *sighs*

Most Amazon gift-wrapping is done by semi-trained volunteers, whose charity is paid $.10 per package wrapped. There's a lot of incentive to get it done as quickly as possible, and if you do a bad job, it's not like they can fire you.

Great for Amazon because they get to pay sub-minimum-wage for gift wrapping...great for charities because they get the money. Bad for consumers, because who knows who wrapped your gift.

/I know because I've been that guy.

Well, on the plus side, it was in a normal sized box, right?

I bought the cheap hardback Beedle the Bard, and it came in the same sort of stupid title on the outside box. Same with the Wall-e blu ray. Lame!

@mayrc87: Exactly this, if you'd ever bought a Harry Potter book around release time this is not a new issue.

Aside from that the only way this becomes a fail is if his 13 year old nephew actually gets the box from the front porch. I would assume his parents would have enough sense to remove the gift from the box. Additionally with all the tracking information you get once the package ships you know the date it will arrive, and most people know what time packages usually get delivered to their house. With all that in mind would it really be that hard to make sure the kid didn't see it? At least you could ask a neighbor to grab the package before the kid gets home.

@Git Em SteveDave loves this guy->★: Hmm, that one label on top seems unnecessary. STUPID SHIPPING GANG! RED ALERT!

so wait, unless he had it shipped to the nephews house so his parents could give it to him because he wouldnt see his nephew for christmas, and assuming that he doesnt live with the nephew, then couldnt he just take the gift wrapped book out first then give it him? dont see what the problem is, unless of course you are referring to the hundreds of others who might have ordered this to be sent to the same house in which the giftee lives. in that case yeah, i see your point but for this guy, no harm done.

I ordered the Tales of Beedle the Bard from Amazon, both the regular edition and the limited edition and I didn't get a fancy box like this. They both shipped from the same distribution center but shipped in 2 seperate boxes. Just regular Amazon brown boxes. You would think that I bought both editions, I'd get it in one fancy box and not 2 seperate regular boxes.

Well since this is my photo (Hi, I'm matt) let me give a little more information. My brother and his family lives a few thousand miles away. I love Amazon, I actually did 90% of my holiday shopping using Amazon and had the items gift wrapped and shipped to the recipient's house. With this delivery, my nephew just happened to of been the only one home at the time of delivery. The book inside was gift wrapped with a card to him, but..Well you see the box.

well, you can at least get your money back. Send in pictures and they will refund.
Usually their wrapping is ok but twice I have had it torn or just plain shoddily done. I just sent in a couple cell phone pics and got refunded.

If the kid seen the box - what I would do is get something else, put it inside the box that they seen - and give that. Maybe something stupid that you know is not something they would want (McDonald coupon book or something) - then have the book hidden elsewhere and after the "disappointment", give them the book - and BOOM - the surprise is back!

I had the same thing happen with DisneyShopping.com this year. I ordered an Ultimate Wall-E for my wife and Disney sent it in a box labeled on all four sides. Disney was nice enough to refund my shipping and give me a $30 credit but that took an Email Carpet bomb.

I just got a shipment from amazon. It was a simple flimsy cardboard box with ONE strip of tape on the top. Needless to say, it imploded from outside force, and only 1/2 of the box was sealed. At first it looked like someone had opened the box. I checked the contents, and luckily the Wii game and HDMI cable hadn't fallen out, as the the gap in the box was easily 3x larger than either of these items.

So a $4 dollar charge to the customer, costs Amazon a .10 cent donation to a charity. Wow.

not bad...but...wal-mart shipped my girlfriend a stereo that she intends to give her sister in the manufacturers graphic heavy box, with a picture of the product on each side. what's worse is that she had it shipped to her parents house due to them being retired and able to accept shipment easier, her sister was visiting the house when it showed up. one more reason to hate wal-mart.

I know Amazon normally gets reamed for poor quality packaging, and some of those time I get it, but this is an entirely different set of issues.

I work in processing in a public library and ALL of J.K. Rowling's items, plus any other time-sensitive street-dated items come in boxes clearly marked what they are, regardless of whether it is shipped from Amazon or Baker & Taylor (where libraries get their books). FYI, when Breaking Dawn (Stephenie Meyer) came out, we were technically prohibited from even opening the box until midnight on release day. Many of us trudge in early to get the books covered, labeled and barcoded so we can release them when we open.

So, while this gift wrapping incident turned out poorly for the OP and his nephew, please understand this is one time when it is not really Amazon's fault.

@MaxSmart32:
Read her post again.

If there's 10 books, a packing list of what books are there isn't going to do you much good.

Sure, for one item it works. But then again, how is that any better than having the item name on the box? So, if you are the giftee, instead of reading the box to see what's inside, you read the packing list. Either way, the secret is out of the bag.

@Saboth: Well, technically, it didn't implode. That's still an explosion. Like controlled demolition, it's just an explosion that causes the resulting debris to go inward.

@CarnageSIS:

I got a DVD player a couple years ago, and it shipped in the store box. Of course I was the first one home. Walked to the front door, picked up the package, put it on the table and went to do my thing. I didn't even think twice about it.

Needless to say, I was made fun of Christmas day.

@unspeak: Wow, for "consumerists" you guys really fail at seeing costs. Plus the guy is full of it. A simple google search shows that they pay $.60 to $.75 per package wrapped by a volunteer.

Also do you really think that the packages are only done by volunteers?

Lawyer!

@kid_moe: and? most of the boxes electronics come in are also shippable as-is.

Did she pay for a gift wrap? if not, then no foul.

Besides, it's not like her sisters name was plastered all over it.

I'm confused, so can this guy not just open the box and put the gift wrapped item under the tree? I'm honestly not seeing what amazon did wrong here. Would it have ben better packaging if they wrapped the box the book was in and then put that in a bigger box and shipped it to him?

@mayrc87: But it's gift-wrapped - they could have at least put it in a different box. A different, MUCH LARGER box.

@frieze: I often get things from Amazon in boxes provided by the manufacturer that have the name of the product written on the packaging. I believe Amazon has to ship these items in the provided boxes, so they wrap the item instead. Not really an Amazon fail here, methinks.

Personally I think this is hilarious, but I'd be pissed if it happened to me.

It reminds me of that christmas episode of "Happy Days" when Richie got a wrapped up basketball and started dribbling the wrapped up package around and said, "Gee, I wonder what it is". Ah,...good times.

Follow me.

Yet another reason not to deal with Amazon. Whenever I had a problem with them, it was not fun dealing with people on the subcontinent. I rather pay a bit more from a local independent book shop then deal with them.

@sodomanaz: It was $.10 when I did it. Are you calling me a liar?

Thanks also for not linking to the Google search.

At the distribution center in Lexington, KY, virtually ALL the gift wrapping was done by volunteers. There's a workstation with about 20-40 stations set up that's constantly busy.

@InfiniTrent: Okay, here's one article I found:

[www.internetretailer.com]

This policy has changed since last year, or differs between DC locations. We were paid 10 cents apiece.

@unspeak: Well... I'm thinking of what it would take for my work to do that, and a $0.60->$4 markup is actually pretty far.

(I use sodomanaz's numbers here because he provides both sides of the ratio -- your $0.10 may be accurate, but the charge might not've been $4 then.)

Basically, every customer complaint associated with a charitable project is seen as a HUGE problem -- an avoidable one, one avoided by not doing the project. Such a project would not JUST have to pay for itself, it would have to generate enough money and press to be worth every real and imagined probem it was associated with.

I run a similar project at my job -- there's an Annoying Task we pay our employees store credit to do at home on their own time. It's useful, but for it to work at all it has to be utterly smooth.

If I pitched this plan to my boss, I'd need a markup like that, and I'd count myself lucky if the project was considered break-even.

Oh, great. I ordered this off my sister's wishlist and had it shipped to her house in another state so that I wouldn't have to carry it in my suitcase when I go there for Christmas. Looks like she'll know exactly what she'll be getting when she checks her mail this week. (Sure, she could find out by searching through her wishlist, but she's not the type to do that sort of thing.)

@CHM: Right. I'm surprised so many people here are missing the point. I did the same thing as you -- shipping to the recipient's house in another state so that I could give it to her on Christmas -- though I didn't specify the giftwrapping. Giving Beedle the Bard as a gift is rather pointless when the shipping container says what's inside.

@BrianDaBrain: Actually it looks like the OP ordered the book for his nephew who does NOT live in the same household, thus providing him (The OP) no opportunity to intercept the package or remove the revealing box before his nephew saw it. Amazon allows you to send direct to someone other than yourself so I think they are at some fault here.

I got the same box - my assumption was that the books were shipped from the publisher in those boxes to Amazon's distribution center - partially to keep them from selling early due to not realizing when it was supposed to be released.

we live in Richmond, VA & my mom insists on still purchasing items from Circuit City. she ordered a Wii Fit for my sister for Christmas. well when they delivered it, it wasn't in a cardboard box. they had just slapped a FedEx label on the Wii Fit box & left it on our front porch for everyone to see. luckily it came when my mom was home so she was able to sneak it upstairs.

@skitchparks: Sounds like the problem was that this was ordered as a gift, wrapping was paid for, and it was shipped *to the recipient*. So while you would *think* there would be an amazon box with a wrapped gift inside it and a gift label on the gift saying "Mark, merry Christmas from uncle Jim", the kid comes home from school to find a box addressed to him and clearly labeled with the contents. With a gift-wrapped book inside.

Seems that when you've requested gift wrapping and requested that it be shipped to the recipient, the system ought to override and put it in a generic gift/amazon box.