The Stupid Shipping Gang is back to work at Amazon: indeed, it never left. The Stupid Shipping Gang are the people who package e-commerce items for shipping, using inappropriately large or excessive packaging. Matthew’s office ordered nine RAM modules for laptop computers…and received them in nine separate boxes.

Here are a few reasons why they might not have fit all nine in one box:

• Some of them might have come from a different distribution center. This one is unlikely, but becomes more likely the more of the same item that you order.

• They wanted to keep track of all nine pieces. A kingpin of the Stupid Shipping Gang explained to us last year that online retailer want to keep track of their merchandise.

“There are a lot of people out there who will try to say that you short shipped them and not pay,” he writes. “This gives [the retailer] something to fall back on.”

If every one of those nine boxes was tracked individually to the customer’s doorstep, then it’s harder to claim that the box only contained eight.

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