As you can tell, we're sorta big on being green here at Unplggd. So it seemed pretty discerning to us when we discovered how Kmart decided to ship a single print cartridge to our doors. True size comparison and mountain of foam peanuts is after the jump, but beware green readers - this isn't for the faint of heart!
Behold, the horror! Not only did they decide to use a mountain of foam peanuts instead of the new slightly eco-friendly plastic bags filled with air, but the box wasn't even sealed properly, leaking peanuts all over our lawn by the time we got back from work.
How many gallons worth of peanuts, you ask? Well, we knew our local post office had a drop-off for packing materials, so we filled up nearly half a 13 gallon bag with the peanuts and brought it over. Doing the math, that's over 6 gallons of peanuts for a single HP printer cartridge not much larger than the size of my iPhone. Ridiculous!
Here's to hoping retail stores will begin to show a little more sensitivity for the environment when sending stuff out. Kmart, we know you're kind of a late-bloomer to the online business, but this is strike one. We hope to never see something like this again.
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Comments (9)
Just make sure you reuse the peanuts to ship something else, or donate them to a box store that takes them and will ship something else with them. Just because those peanuts are going to be with us longer than we will be around doesn't mean they should spend that time in the land fill.
I suggest shipping back the merchandise to Kmart with the excuse that they packed it wrong and buy your ink from somewhere else. Maybe an ink recycler?
I'm surprised this was K-Mart, and now Dell or CDW (whom are notorious where I work for similar packing fiascoes).
they do this probably to make sure things make it in one piece and because they want to keep their costs down and only buy, lets say 3 sizes of boxes.
i hate overpacking, and i have had even more ridiculous experiences (a medium sized fedex box that contained 3, 6" steel rulers that took up about 2% of the box) but on the other hand i have also had the USPS crack a shipping tube in half, put holes in my boxes, and basically destroy my mail. so although i hate it, i do enjoy when my packages make it in once piece
I was irked when I received a shipment of cartridges from Lexmark the other day. They even have a cartridge recyling program.
Their box wasn't as egregiously over-sized as this, but the box was WAY too large. They did, nowever, use only a single one of those blow-up plastic pillows as packing material.
I can top this. I once ordered a *sweater* that arrived in a large box, packed with foam peanuts. Maybe they thought there was a risk of acrylic breaking during shipping?
The fact is that with these package, they can't be blamed if the shipment arrives broken, so they use as many protection as they can to assure a good shipping.
During my previous work, i was explained that a retunr policy cost much more than some peanuts, so they try to avoid it regardless the environment.
Making them realize this mistake is great, because, a good packaging doesn't always mean overreacting like that, and sometimes simple solutions (like recycled stripes of newspaper) can provide a good protection !
i got something similar when i ordered my minidisplay port to vga adaptar, a big box compared to the minidisplay port.
LMAO!
Such waste considering the cartridge and the container it's wrapt in is mostly indestructible to normal handling.