Members of the Stupid Shipping Gang have invaded Walmart.com, where an order of 50 boxes of Crayola crayons shipped not in one or two larger cardboard boxes, but each in its own cardboard box.

The above image was posted on Reddit, and one’s initial reaction is probably, “So what? The box is bigger than the crayons, but at least there’s some padding so they don’t break in transit.”

But then you see the following image of all of the boxes that resulted from Walmart packing each pack of crayons in its own box:

One Reddit reader tries to explain what likely happened:

I’ve managed warehouses for a while now and one of them had an “order sorter” machine – products go in and get sorted by orders directly into boxes, then scanned out and on the conveyor to shipping. Sometimes the database has the wrong size in it for an item and it may think that that crayon box is the size that would fill that box. So it assigns that size box and the people packing out stuff just let it go through to shipping most of the time.

Luckily, the customer ordered these crayons for in-store pick-up. So at least these boxes could be opened and repacked at the store, leaving Walmart to deal with the empties, rather than having Mt. Cardboard sitting on the curb on recycling day.

Want more consumer news? Visit our parent organization, Consumer Reports, for the latest on scams, recalls, and other consumer issues.