We’ve all been there: You open up a giant box from Amazon to find the tiniest of products inside and wonder when they’re going to figure out how to ship orders in a box that makes sense.
Well, they’ve heard your complaints and, rest assured, they’re on it.
Driving the news: Amazon is ditching its (sometimes comically oversized) boxes and is shipping more stuff to people in the manufacturer’s packaging.
- 11% of Amazon orders are now shipped without extra packaging, per The Wall Street Journal.
Why it matters: Aside from cutting down on the volume of boxes piling up in your recycling, the effort is part of Amazon’s larger strategy to offer faster and cheaper shipping.
- The fewer times an Amazon fulfillment worker has to handle an order—to put it in a box, for example—the faster it can get out the door and the less money Amazon has to spend.
- Since 2019 the company says it has cut the distance deliveries travel from warehouses to customers by 15%, and quadrupled the number of same- and next-day deliveries in the US.
Yes, but: It’s unlikely that Amazon will ever be able to avoid packaging orders itself entirely. After all, who among us hasn’t ordered some things online that we’d much prefer show up on our doorstep in that anonymous, indiscernible brown Amazon box?—TS