Has your parcel been excessively packaged?

This comment was removed at the request of the user

This comment was removed at the request of the user

This is how some milk cartons were sent:

Nicely packed and no chance of damage but………

Each carton is individually wrapped in over a metre of bubble wrap and I order 24 cartons at a time.

I am unsure whether they are manufacturer packed in 6s 8s or 12s, (I think they are packs of 6) but they have their own original packaging for protection. Removing the original packaging and wrapping each separately is slightly ludicrous.

I have a similar gripe with supermarket deliveries as they are removed from packaging and chucked in carrier bags so they arrive quite dented and sometimes leaking.

When products have their own packaging, why don’t retailers make them available in their pack size? They would save on excess packing materials, wasting original packing materials and refunds for damaged products.

Perhaps we could promote good practice. I received two packs of vacuum cleaner bags from an eBay trader. These were already sealed in plastic bags, so all the supplier had done was to wrap them in brown paper. This passed the Hermes test and meant little waste.

The reality of modern delivery systems is that goods are subjected to much more wear and tear in the depots and hubs than used to be the case. Mechanical handling has rightly replaced back-breaking manual effort and a tendency for humans to chuck things around but it has introduced its own range of problems. Stuff now goes around carousels, is conveyed on elevators and automatically sorted into bins and cages, and gets tumbled and dropped into containers on its route through the depot. And the human element has not been eliminated altogether because the driver needs to load the van and sort the contents in order of delivery. To survive all this, good packaging is essential but not always provided. Companies presumably learn from returns experience how much packaging is required needed and the mass of an object tends to determine the robustness of the packaging required. A radiator should have thick corner protectors as it will otherwise burst through any flimsy wrapping.

Another consideration is pilferage – large packaging is sometimes used to make it more difficult to conceal small items or to reveal the contents. It also stops small items from slipping through gaps in the conveyor lines or between other goods in the van.

I ordered an expensive, and rather heavy, book a few months ago and it was enclosed in the standard form of cardboard packaging with a a form of crumple zone all round the book. Nevertheless, this was still not adequate because during its journey from the supplier to me it must have had a few collisions since the outside corners on the front and back covers were deformed and some of the pages were creased as well. I did not notice this until some time after I had received it as the book’s jacket was unaffected, and since the damage was not critical I took no action. The mass of the book was out of all proportion to the protective properties of the packaging and, given the book’s price, I feel that a human would have been likely to have made a better decision on how to pack it.

Recently received a hand-tied bouquet of flowers via Interflora (ie arrived tied in a bunch in water). They were beautiful but unfortunately the experience was marred by the 3 large sheets of Interflora branded plastic wrapping which cannot be reused for anything. Some plastic is necessary to hold the water but this could have been in a smaller bag or just one sheet with tissue paper as would have been used in the past. I also suspect the ribbon used is not easily recyclable either.