Packing Silliness

14 Apr 2019 at 21:15 // under misc

To go with my new bike, I bought a couple of new locks on amazon. One was a high security thing, while the other was what others have described as a ‘cafe lock’. The sort of thing that is very light and easy to carry and can be attached in seconds though doesn’t provide the same level of protection as a proper lock. These are useful for parking your bike outside a cafe while you pop in to buy something. When you always have line of site to the bike and can run out and protect it. It is just enough to stop someone simply jumping on the bike and pedaling off.

The cafe locks I bought are essentially a glorified pair of cable ties. They aren't particularly large or long and weigh next to nothing. I was therefore surprised when amazon told me they couldn’t deliver it to a local locker because it would not fit. This made no sense to me but I got it delivered to the house anyway.

Well when it arrived, I could see why they thought it wouldn’t fit in the locker. They delivered it in a huge long box. And the locks were as big as I was expecting. I see no reason why they needed to get put in such a ridiculously long box. A padded envelope would have done.

I have had silly packing issues before but this has to be the worst one. It is clear that an automated system didn’t get the size of the packet right, so the website would not let me get it delivered to the lockers. Fine. These things happen. What really annoys me is that nobody noticed when packing it. Nobody looked and went, ‘that is silly, it clearly doesn’t need that size of a box, I will get it corrected’. Either it was an automated robot or a human with so little time and authorisation, the may as well have been a robot, so they did as they were told. As a result Amazon have transported and awkward sized box for no reason. And because they have not corrected the system, the will do it again. And the next person will not be able to collect it from a locker.

Perhaps in their drive for efficiency, they have started to cut out the thing that can be useful, having a human in the loop to correct errors.

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