An example of how society’s values are all screwed up
Posted by Alex on 8 Jul, 2009 in Articles | 4 comments
The doorbell rang, a delivery man was there. “Sign here”, he said, and handed me a cardboard box. “Thanks,” I said, noticing how light the box was. I knew I’d recently ordered two new hard drives and a SATA card (to connect them into our server). This was too light to be either.
You can see from the photos below what was inside – a box the size of two shoeboxes, stuffed with brown paper, containing 2 tiny red SATA cables (which could at a pinch fit in a normal paper envelope if you wanted to). I had ordered these from http://newegg.ca/ as part of the order for the SATA card. I was shocked that they would ship these individually and in such a wasteful way. A jiffy bag would have been more appropriate, and why on earth do the cables needed to be shipped separately.
This got me thinking, people talk about how we should have an economical model where we take into account the real environmental cost, not to mention the money cost. I can’t think of a better illustration than this. Not only all that waste packaging, but the fact that the delivery man made a separate trip to deliver it.. Wasteful deliveries like this must equate to a lot of fuel, vehicle wear and tear, not to mention packing note printing, labour to package the thing, backroom admin by the supplier and the courier.
It’s really sad that somebody decided it’s “cheaper” to treat all items the same, send each part of an order in an identical size box, regardless of what it really needs or what is sensible.
I guess common sense doesn’t scale.
Here’s an image I found online which tells a similar story quite succinctly:
Wow. Will you write to Newegg.ca? A lot of companies won’t change their practices unless they’re pressured from outside.
Very true. I tend to think it would be a drop in the ocean though. I will tell them though (if they don’t notice this blog post!).
If it were me, I’d write a snail-mail letter. Has much more impact than an email these days. There used to be an old adage that a complaint letter represented the opinions of 99 other people who felt the same way but didn’t bother to write. You could also tip off some consumer/environment organizations.
The irony is that they’d save $$ and get great PR if they did use less packaging.