Ditto for my partner who ordered a 2 kitchen knife cutting set. Came in a presentation box that was long and thin. The postage box was a standard rectangular shape and contained the knife set in wrapping including bubble wrap. The 95% void of the postage box was similarly filled with those air filled plastic bag pillows.
A wild guess is Myer deliveries have agreed a range of standard box sizes and contract rates with AP. It makes some sense that a long item would need a larger box. Not how some might package a product, but one way to be more assured it is neither lost or readily damaged? It is AP after all. That delivery arrived a day early without the usual - your parcel is arriving today advice.
Many of the contracts for delivery with many services allow quite a large variation of capacity of containers to be sent at the same rate. For the business sending the item, the difference in packaging is then not a huge cost consideration, particularly as small items in transit can easily be mislaid and lost.
It can much more easy to see and handle a medium to large box than a small inconspicuous item on the floor, particularly with large delivery labels that need to be attached for tracking and delivery scanning taking up huge real estate on the boxes.
As an example, with Australia Post size and weight are much more of a consideration for non commercial senders, but StarTrack are far more lenient to their commercial users. While we see it as waste, the business sending the item may see it as a benefit to use larger sizes, even what might be described as excessive sizes, so that an item is easier to track, handle, and protect.
I am aware of some business that have only a limited number of box sizes they use when sending purchased items to their customers. The boxes they have are based on the freight contractor they use (their own specifications for packaging) and the fees for the services. They also have limited box sizes to minimise the number of different box sizes they have to manufacture with their logos and then store ready for use - making overall business costs cheaper.
It is possible while logic defies a rational person, Myer follows this approach.
Alternatively, if they used a largwe range of box sizes from the very small to large, they might have run out of them for your particular shipment.
In a perfect world, many already packaged/boxed items would be wrapped in paper or placed in an envelope for despatch. But, the risks of damage of the goods in transit may increase, especially for those more fragile items.
Here’s a report we received about Dark Choc Mint ‘Deluxe’ Tim Tams. These are 175g weight, priced $6.50 at time of writing at Woolworths. As you can see the packaging creates additional space, possibly to disguise the product size as compared to Tim Tams originals as shown below.
The attached example shows that the volume of the contents is only approximately one third of the package size.
I know that displaying the Net weight on the packaging is a mandatory requirement, but the benefit of this has always been limited, if you don’t know the Mass of the product. I’s suggest that nobody would know the Mass of food products that they are purchasing.
The attached example, I would suggest, is intentionally deceptive. If the package size was only just large enough for the product, most consumers would consider the product over-priced when glancing at it on a supermarket shelf.
Local manufacturers want Australians to support local products, but to earn that support, they need to be honest with the consumer.
The empty space in food packaging should be a maximum of 20% (perhaps less) of the volume of the product in the packaging.
I have moved your post about excessive packaging ( or small content) to a topic that has been created previously for this sort of example. Thank you for your post.
There’s an equivalent to Claratyne available that ships in a 365-tablet bottle from the US. It’s called Allerclear, Loratadine 10mg /tablet. I have bought it in the past from eBay: it’s a Kirkland product and it uses the same dose of the same active ingredient as the locally available product, but it’s immensely cheaper and is in a very small, neat bottle with a safety cap- no deceptive packaging!
I received in the mail a new icebreaker merino thermal top. It was packed in a plastic bag which was double the size needed; this, in turn, was in a very durable cardboard box wrapped in brown paper, followed by a plastic bag.
On the cardboard package icebreaker states, ’ We lead a movement towards a more natural way of living, by taking unnecessary plastic out of performance apparel. Move to natural.’
The company I bought the top from on the internet I assume, would have added the brown paper and plastic address envelope.
I wonder if society can begin to address excessive internet sales packaging.
Your post has been moved to this existing topic about excessive packaging that has been going for sometime now. I think the vast majority here would agree with your assessment about the waste that this excessive packaging creates and in the end costs us all both monetarily and environmentally.
Christmas time is also baking time. So we needed some more baking powder and bought “White Mill” from ALDI. When I opened the box, I was surprised to find that it was less than half full. The box said ‘275g’, but I hadn’t read that beforehand and had been misled by the size of the box. Here, too, there is a clear discrepancy between the size of the packaging and its contents.
