Yet another Amazon poor-packing rant
Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to Tuesday, wherein I initiate yet another Amazon packing rant because Amazon sent me yet another package with barely any padding.
Let's get to the dirt right away. I bought two disk arrays for work. They are not cheap. They are not light. They were thrown into boxes by the Amazonauts with about six inches of air for padding. I got two cartons like this:
They were kind enough to throw a small layer of paper on top. One wonders why they protected a half-inch of air, but didn't seem to care about the big six-inch gap on the side:
We here at ZDNet have discussed the migration from retail to online somewhat ad nauseum. Here are two recent commentaries by Jason Perlow and yours truly:
I live in something of a wasteland myself — central Florida — and even if I wanted to buy some gear locally, I couldn't. So, I rely on Amazon and other online retailers for just about anything important.
There is no excuse for this. Amazon, in particular, should have the quality control structure in place to know to throw some frickin' padding in the frickin' box, if you know what I mean.
I've discussed this before. Amazon isn't alone. Another online retailer which I frequent, Newegg, pulled the same thing, but not with anything quite as fragile as hard drives or disk arrays:
- Why you might not want to buy a hard drive from Amazon
- Rant: online retailers and their crappy packaging jobs
Of course, the only real difference in shipping is that we don't see how badly vendors pack when sending goods to retailers, but at least that prevents packing-related rants.
Look, we need to insist on quality from our vendors. There is absolutely no reason packing has to be this shoddy.
Frankly, I expect better from Amazon. I'm disappointed (again).