#HTE

Rain’s Weekly Design Minutiae: Environmental Disaster, Neatly Packaged

I ordered two items from Staples and they arrived today. Here they are, the boxes laid on a grid of inches for scale.

Inside the first box are paper towels that fit the dispenser in my photo studio. The box is perfectly sized to the amount of paper towels within, there’s not a wasted inch.

Opening the second box, we see a strip of plastic air pockets…

…protecting the cargo within.

Below is the amount of materials required to ship me this SR44 battery for my digital calipers.

The battery is small enough that I could swallow it but the box it came in is larger than my head.

So why is it packaged this way, because Staples loves wasting cardboard and plastic? No. Either they or whomever they’ve subcontracted their fulfillment out to undoubtedly has some warehouse system in place, a series of pickers, packagers, conveyor belts, automatic labelers, scanning machines and vehicle-loading infrastructure, that is designed to handle cardboard boxes of sizes common to the majority of their wares.

At some point a Staples bean counter undoubtedly realized that the above-depicted scenario would take place. And realized that because of the scale that they’re operating at, it doesn’t matter. With their expensive and efficient systems in place, it would cost them more money to have someone pop the battery in a small padded envelope, write my address on it with a Bic pen, slap a couple stamps on it and walk it over to a U.S.P.S. mailbox. And their protocols prevent them from opening the paper towel box, dropping the battery in there and taping the box back up.

I’m sure they’ve figured out the macro stuff, and that their system is somehow the least wasteful when viewed from 10,000 feet. At least, that’s what I want to believe. It’s just hard to swallow that wasting this much material in this individual case is somehow logical.

http://www.core77.com/posts/62927/Rains-Weekly-Design-Minutiae-Environmental-Disaster-Neatly-Packaged