A reader writes, “As part of our Christmas shopping; we ordered several DVD’s, video games, and a phone card from Wal-Mart’s website.” The items trickled in over several days, then “this showed up. A 10X11X5 inch box, an air-filled air bubble, and one thin phone card taped to the bottom of the box.”

Companies, this has got to stop! It’s wasteful and annoying. It’s stupid. It can’t cost that much to hire someone to put together a shipping program that uses different package sizes for different types of products.

Stop wasting so much material and making the consumer complicit in your waste. Ever heard of envelopes? Use envelopes. Figure out the logistics. It’s not as if Christmas season only passes by the Earth every 75 years—prepare your facilities and employees to handle the annual, predictable increase in fulfillment.

Despite Amazon’s novel hard-drive-shipping technique, they’ve at least begun to address this. We ordered a single book from them last week and it arrived in a flat package, stiff enough to protect the book but malleable enough for our insane mail carrier to somehow fold it like an origami Cthulhu temple so that he could shove it into our mailbox. So we know you can do it, companies. Stop being lazy. And fire the shipping facility manager who let that card get shipped out like that. (What? It’s not Christmas anymore.)

(Thanks to Ian!)

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