So I go out my front door and almost trip over a 10x10x10 box on my porch, an unexpected UPS delivery.
It’s from an auto parts discounter. A-ha… but WTF?
I open it.
I remove the big puffy air-bag that fills it.
I remove the invoice, which is pressed down over
A small chrome aircleaner nut on a card.
For which I paid $1.19 with free shipping.
The shipping must have cost at least double that, if not triple, even at mass-shipper rates. I expected a small padded envelope in the mailbox, the usual route for small, not-fragile items sent via free shipping.
I’m going out to the garage now to screw my -$3.00 nut on my car. And wonder how these guys can justify their sales and shipping policies.
ETA: Yeah, yeah, “Volume.” (Also, this was not Amazon shipping, but the third-party seller.)
I odered cat treats, something like $40 for the free standard shipping for perhaps 20 of them IDK. The next day I got three with a note that the order has been split (overnight shipping). The next day I got 3 more, the follow day I get 6 boxes all at once fulfilling the order, one box being something like 2ftx3ftx1ft (the rest reasonable for package size). I just figured someone in the shipping dept was having fun or trying to bankrupt the company.
Getting shipments in multiple boxes is often because the components are shipped from different Amazon warehouses. I can see that; it’s worth taking a hit on the order to preserve their reputation. When it’s not too extreme, it makes you feel valued. But yeah… double-digit shipments of small items is a system blindly going off the rails.
Former and possibly future Amazon shipping center workers here; at least you answered one of my lingering questions about why sometimes we get these huge boxes that weight almost nothing.
As for the rest, Amazon is so "customer centric’ or centered (at least on shipping) that we are almost told to ignore the cost if that is what it takes to get the customer his/her perfect package on time. Usually the silly cases (having folks stay until 5AM - usual shutdown is 10PM - to get something out for delivery by the USPS the next day) are salaried workers (Manny G Ment) and not us wage slaves. But it still amazes me every time it happens.
There’s another element to that, at least for higher priced items - if you send out, say, 10 laptops, then if you send them out individually you have 10 tracking numbers - hard for the customer to deny they didn’t get them. If you send out a box with 10 laptops in then you only have one tracking number - if the customer says they only got nine then it’s harder to prove they’re lying.
I understand “minimum conveyable size” but back when Amazon was primarily a book seller, they had the ability to take a small paperback book and shrink-wrap it to a 9x12" or so sheet of cardboard to be placed in a roughly 9x12x2" box.
They seem to have lost that technology, judging by the number of small things (memory modules, spools of thread, watch batteries, etc that I’ve received from them knocking around loose in a comically large box.
I clicked on that link to read it and, to my surprise, I went to grade school with the author (and the rest of her family). Her brother has an interesting life story that involves moving across the world to Tuva, learning Russian and managing the Alash Ensemble (throat singers).
Just last Saturday I ordered an HDMI cable that was a Lightning Deal. I have Prime so I got free two-day shipping. Imagine my surprise when a USPS mail carrier pulled up in his truck and delivered it yesterday. Sunday. There’s a fulfillment center about ten miles away so I could understand it being delivered the next business day, but a special trip on Sunday? For a $5.99 cable?
I’m not complaining, but it seems nuts and I wouldn’t think any less of Amazon if it had been delivered today. Haven’t used it yet, either.
Oh, and I meant to add one of my own. A few weeks ago I went to order something on Amazon. It was an Add On Item worth $2.90 (a switch plate). Since it was an add on item, I had to bump the order up to $25 to get it to ship so I threw on a few books and the switch that was to go with the switch plate.
They shipped the switch in one box, the books in another and the switch plate in it’s own UPS box. In the end, they could have just shipped me the switch plate without forcing me to spend all the extra money. I understand that I still spend the extra money which still offsets the cost of shipping that one item in it’s own box, but you’d think they’d make sure that Add On items end up packaged with the other stuff they’re making you buy…that is the point. Maybe they could let Prime Members ignore the Add On threshold once they’ve spent a certain amount of money. Just looking, I’ve already spent over 1200 dollars this year at Amazon on about 70 items.
How about 1 ‘free’ add on item for every 500 spent?
Speaking of Sunday delivery, I have almost everything send to work (it’s a store, we’re open, but I don’t work on Sundays). I always feel kind of stupid and kind of bad for the postal workers when one of my employees comes up to me on Monday morning and says ‘whaddya get, the mail man showed up here yesterday’ and I have to say ‘Staples. I got a box of staples’.
I don’t know how they decide what gets the super special Sunday treatment, but if I order on Thursday or Friday somethings will say ‘Arriving Sunday’ and some will say “Arriving Monday/Tuesday”. The funny thing is, I can’t even opt out of the Sunday delivery.
And to make it worse, the last time I had a delivery scheduled for a Sunday, it didn’t show up until Monday anyways and the tracking said ‘Business Closed’ on the Sunday it was supposed to show up. I thought about chatting with Amazon just to let them know that some lazy USPS guy put that in, we were open on Sunday at 11am and Amazon should know that USPS is slacking.
It’s possible, but we open at 8 and someone probably would have seen him if he was at the door before then. The tracking said 11am which may have been when he got back to the post office, I’m not sure. The other odd thing was that instead of being at the post office in Milwaukee it was in something like Kansas City, so the tracking was just messed up to begin with (what’s new, USPS), but I think that was a mistake because it was at my local post office that morning and out for delivery that day, so I don’t think it could have been in KC by the afternoon.
Anyways, I didn’t know the details and it did show up the next day (with in Prime Delivery time, Sunday would have been a day early), so I left it alone.
However, if you pull up a chat window on Amazon and whine about your shipment being a day or two late, they’ll extend your Prime by a month. So if something says it’s going to be here on Tuesday, on Wednesday morning I’ll email them. Not that I need anything that badly, but for $100 a year, I want what I’m paying for. Besides, I’m sure they get their money back from UPS. I know when my business ships something out if it doesn’t show up when it’s supposed to UPS gives us our money back.