OK, so don’t judge, I needed a gray outlet and Amazon was easier then the supply house and same price.
I expected it in it’s standard retail box, but no, it arrived NAKED just like going to the supply house or hardware store where you grab one out of the box of 50 on the shelf. Yes it had it’s standard UPC sticker on it but nothing else.
Was just taken aback by this. Not offended cause I’m all for lowering packaging so good.
There is now an option to forgo Amazon packaging. It is in the place the order screen, they ask.
Like, “ship in own container” naked, like, they slapped the shipping label on the outlet and hoped it got to you, naked?
Or they just dumped that in a bubble mailer? 'Cause I ordered a dryer part once that got damaged 'cause it was shipped in a bubble mailer. Had to go find one local that wasn’t damaged in shipping. (Can’t actually recall if it fixed the problem. It’s been a minute and it wasn’t my dryer.)
Was it delivered by one of the Amazon delivery van? If there is nothing (like a shipping label/sticker) on the item, how did the driver even know where to deliver it to?
There exists a happy medium between that item showing up in a 20x20x20 box with 20 air bubbles and in nothing at all.
Seriously, Idiocracy is upon us…
This. With another outlet and 2 other items
Paper mailer (no padding). No complaints
Yes, electric smile van
I’m with you, then. I’m all for reducing unnecessary packaging, but that’s how you get the metal scrape-y bits scraping other things and causing damage. At least if I pick it up in person I can chuck the outlets in one bag and the impulse purchases in another. (mini buckets my beloved.)
For a minute there I had a completely different interpretation of that sentence. I thought maybe their new cost saving measure was getting rid of AC in their delivery vehicles…
Did it have an ASIN sticker?
It was naked in the privacy of a paper mailer.
I was under the impression that they slapped a shipping label covering its “privates” and you received it on your doorstep wearing only the label like it just stepped out of the shower in a towel.
Was this sold by Amazon?
Yes:
Shipper / Seller
Amazon is on the wrong side of history, IMHO. The history of standardized packaging, that is.
Amazon knows that it is dealing with inefficiencies. With typical Amazonian short-sightedness, instead of getting better packaging, they try to get rid of packaging.
Sigh. I though that I left that mind set behind in kindergarten.
One of the most interesting books that I have read in the past few years was about the history of cargo containers. ( No joke: ASIN = 0691123241 ) It showed in detail the grotesque inefficiencies of loading ships and trains and trucks by hand.
Unions thought that they were better off if a cargo ship was loaded by hand, if the multi-million dollar ship sat at the dock, hogging space, while each item was loaded into its hold by sweating stevedores.
A cargo container - just a big metal box - separated the actions of loading individual items from actually loading the ship. It was a huge leap in efficiency. Unfortunately, it required huge contemporaneous investments. New cranes had to be built; new train cars had to be build, new wheel dollies for trucking had to be build.
But in the end, shipping became much more efficient, and safer for the workers.
Like all standards, it required someone to invest in making it the standard, someone who is willing to throw enough money at the chicken-and-egg problem. When they do, everyone benefits. You just have to keep throwing money at the chickens until they lay eggs.
In the past few decades, there has been a huge increase in the number of small packages shipped. The modern-day stevedores are now working in Amazon trucks and Amazon warehouses, suffering repetitive motion injuries and boredom for little more than minimum wage. Inefficiencies are on the rise again.
There is a huge opportunity here for someone to put a standard in place. It needs to be a small cargo container, something between the size of a shoe box and a banker’s box. ( Maybe there should be a couple of standards invented: one about the side of a shoe box, and one about the size of a 1.5 cubic cardboard box. )
Bezos could do it. If he does not, eventually someone will.
Amazon has this standard, the totes they use on the trucks. They in theory could do the same thing smaller and leave them at customers and then pickup at next delivery, but that requires investment and logistics and people actually returning them.
That is not quite what I meant. Totes have been an in-house feature of many warehouse operations for decades. Even USPS has had them.
I meant an end-to-end standard, like shipping containers or milk crates, in which the warehouse packing worker closes the standardized package and the final customer opens it.
FWIW, this would mean that, like shipping containers and milk crates, the customer must return the empties. That is millions of chickens that must be coerced into participating in an efficient standard.
FWIW2: This means that you put down a small deposit on the container when buying, much like you pay a few cents deposit when you buy a beer. You can keep the Amacrate if you want. Build a house out of them if you wish.
But most people will just return them to the Amazon driver, who will scan them and carry them off. Then the deposit is credited to your account.
Tell the truth … you ordered a blow up doll and it shipped naked …
That’s what happens when you use CoPilot …
How long until Amazon eliminates the bag, too? They likely have a team of top engineers working to miniaturize the shipping label to fit on the outlet.
Will these be sanitized before reuse? We’ve all heard the horror stories of what gets returned to Amazon. 
