icon next to them have been artificially shrunk to better fit your screen; click the icon to restore them, in place, to their regular size.
Nikon D700 + Nikkor 50mm f/1.4 @ 50 mm — 1/250 sec, f/1.4, ISO 900 — full exif
Santa's Preparation
after the elves have gone a bit crazy
I like Amazon.com, and use both its US and Japan sites all the time, but I've never seen such wasteful packaging as I did with an order that recently arrived via forklift from Amazon Japan. The six boxes in the lower part of the stack are fairly spacious, but five of them each contain exactly one sliver-thin 15” × 15” LEGO® Base Plate, a couple of crumpled pieces of paper as ineffective padding, and a lot of air...
Nikon D700 + Nikkor 50mm f/1.4 @ 50 mm — 1/80 sec, f/5.6, ISO 6400 — full exif
Can You See It In There?
It's fantastically ridiculous. The entire order, shown below, could have easily fit into any two of the boxes..
Nikon D700 + Nikkor 50mm f/1.4 @ 50 mm cropped — 1/250 sec, f/5.6, ISO 6400 — full exif
opening the boxes and finding just these few small things would be
Quite the Anticlimatic Experience
Heck, the empty boxes, even when flattened and stacked, still took up substantially more room than the products. It was by far the most ridiculous packaging I've ever seen or even heard of.
It's all the more amazing because Amazon takes proactive steps to reduce packaging and related hassles, with their “Frustration-Free Packaging” initiative, and even some products that ship without product packaging (I've gotten some computer cables that arrived loose in a small box together with the other items I ordered). If you visit your order at Amazon after you've received it, you'll even find a prompt asking for your comments on how it was packaged. I'll do that for this order, referring them to this blog post.
Wow. 5 large boxes for 5 small base plates wins the Preposterous Packaging Prize in my book.
Two other things came to mind with this blog. First, even with the boxes so much larger then what they contain, I don’t see Anthony being disappointed AT ALL with what was inside them. Base plates are key to great Lego structures.
The other thing; back in the day, kids USED to have to sneak around, searching under beds, in attics, trunks, etc to find out what they were getting for Christmas. Now Anthony just needs to pull up your blog!
Did you check the source shipping for the items? A lot of times Amazon either drop ships from the manufacturer, or from multiple warehouses. If they only had one at each warehouse they aren’t going to wait until they got more at the warehouse, or to cross ship all the items to one location before sending to you.
That seems implausible in general, and in this specific case, each box was numbered by a large marker “1” through “6”, and they were accompanied by a single shipping-company label for the whole batch. —Jeffrey
Totally unrelated but your hard wood floors are really nice