Feeling (Amazon) Boxed In

If you need me, I'll be judging people by their recyclables.

Photo by Luku Muffin on Unsplash

I still remember the day when I realized that, somewhere, somehow, there was a factory that made boxes.

And I’m not talking about as a child. I’m talking about in my 40s. Basically yesterday, in geological time.

It’s as if somebody had told me there was an air factory. A place where they make air.

“That’s ridiculous,” I would’ve said. “You don’t make air. It just is.”

It’s the same with cardboard boxes. Boxes just are. They come into being by way of spontaneous generation, like those floss picks you see on the ground literally everywhere you go.

Top of Mount Everest? Floss pick.

Bottom of the Mariana Trench? Floss pick.

The depths of the Amazonian rain forest where indigenous tribes have never encountered Europeans?

Floss picks.

No one knows where these floss picks come from or where they go. I assume they eventually choke a turtle.

Are people really that dedicated to dental hygiene? A brief survey of my daily encounters would lean towards no.

But isn’t it kind of meta that boxes are made? And then, at least sometimes, I assume they’re put in other boxes for shipping. It’s like cannibalism.

Am I an idiot for not knowing that cardboard boxes are manufactured just like everything else?

[shaking Magic 8 ball]

All signs point to yes.

The Rise of Container Shipping

Back in the day, getting a package in the mail was a Big Deal.

You sent in your check (LOL) with your little order slip ripped from the center of the catalog (don’t forget to calculate your shipping and sales tax, preferably in ink). And three months later, if you were lucky, you received a shirt that was the wrong size or shoes that were the wrong size, and you packed everything back up, trekked to the post office, and waited another three months for either your refund or a replacement. Which also didn’t fit.

These were The Dark Times. This was BA: Before Amazon. A time that, much like trigonometry, I can barely remember.

Now, more days than not, you can watch me drag an Amazon box into my house like a bear dragging a carcass into its lair. And inside that box is something I ordered two days ago with the click of a button.

Two days.

It’s fun when they put the box right in front of your door so you either can’t get in or you can’t get out.

Note to Amazon: Handles would help.

But handles would interfere with the slick design and stackability of the ubiquitous square, brown shipping receptacle we call a box.

And shipping is all about the box.

It turns out that moving the contents of one container (box) to another container (box) in the long journey of, say, a banana across the globe, used to be incredibly labor intensive, and therefore costly.

The trip from field (or tree, or bush, or whatever a banana grows on), to truck, to railcar, to cargo ship, to another truck, to your local grocery store, took a lot of fuel and a lot of manpower.

Tally me banana, indeed.

How much more efficient would it be if the bananas could be shoved into a standard-sized metal box that would fit whatever standard-sized frame you placed it on—truck bed, railcar, boat—and you only had to move the container itself, instead of all the stuff inside the container?

It might take 15 guys to empty a truck and put the contents into a railcar, and another 15 to empty the railcar and put everything on a ship, but it only takes one guy to operate a crane.

You can thank Malcom McClean for his standardization of the cargo container in the 1950s. (Isn’t it weird how all the really great innovations seem, in hindsight, incredibly obvious?)

And you can thank Jeff Bezos for the fact that your four-pack of batteries arrives at your house in a box the size of a small couch.

I, Amazon Robot

The other day, I got a box from Amazon in which several yards of plastic air pillows cradled a much, much smaller box of inhalers.

The thing about air pillow packaging is that you have to pop all the pillows before you can shove them in the trash. And you can’t just use your finger or something easy like that.

Oh, no. You need something sharp, like a pencil, or a pair of scissors, or a machete.

Air pillows are of course preferable to old-school packaging peanuts, which somehow both defied gravity and could also actively evade all attempts to pick them up.

Amazon says the reason you get a toothbrush in a box big enough to house a family of three is that their packing software is actually calling the shots.

That isn’t creepy or Skynet-like at all.

The software determines how many packages can fit on a truck, and then, as if playing a lonely game of Tetris, chooses large boxes for small items if that’s what it takes to keep things from shifting around in transit.

It hasn’t been my experience that this actually works. I’ve gotten plenty of crushed boxes of cereal and whatever else from Amazon, and I can only assume that the damage is being inflicted before the box even makes it to the truck.

Maybe somebody at Amazon really hates cereal.

And while it’s true that, in response to complaints about the massive amounts of cardboard and packaging materiel, Amazon is using more padded mailers to ship small items, the boxes are still coming fast and furious.

My first impulse was to save the boxes. All of them. This was a very Boomer thing for me to do and I’m not even a Boomer. But that’s what you used to do, just in case you needed a box for a gift, or storage, or a reenactment of Game of Thrones.

But thanks to Amazon, I’ll never need a box ever again. I can throw them all away and they’ll just keep coming back. Bigger. Stronger. Browner.

And really, Amazon is doing me a favor. Nothing makes me feel more righteous than a trip to the community recycling bins.

What a bunch of booze hounds.