Even if you’ve never opened your mobile phone up, you probably know what a SIM card looks like: they’re the fingernail-sized chips that have your phone number and carrier details. When reader TJ’s employer bought some recently, they employed classic Stupid Shipping Gang tactics to make sure that these cards didn’t go missing.

The Stupid Shipping Gang is our name for the mysterious people in e-commerce who over-package the items that people order. In this case, TJ reports receiving three separate substantial boxes, each of which contained only one SIM.

As a packaging expert explained to us last year, there’s actually a good reason for both of these crimes against common sense, even if they seem wasteful out here in the real world. Tiny envelopes tend to get lost in the postal system, so putting a tiny item in a large box helps keep it from getting lost. It also makes the item less likely to get lost in the shipping fulfillment center itself, which uses rollers that are too widely spaced for a teeny padded envelope.

That’s also the reason why three separate boxes arrive, even if it seems wasteful: “There are a lot of people out there who will try to say that you short shipped them and not pay,” our Stupid Shipping kingpin explained.

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