Having worked in ecommerce on both merchant and SaaS side I can explain why they may have and as a customer you will basically never see it applied.
From an engineering point of view, yes you can save so much packaging for the company and optimise for a delivery to be in fewer boxes, which is a fun problem to solve.
From a retail operations point of view the cost of packaging and shipping is negligible and why it’s so often discounted. The real costs though are labour.
Your pick and packing staff are basically all judged on throughput so if someone spends 5 minutes to pack an order in 1 well fitting box they will be fired if everyone else can pack 5 orders in the same 5 minutes.
Generally speaking your packer station is set up so they either have a terminal showing their packing list, a tub of goods to pack for one or more orders, and stacks of different sized boxes.
The stations usually get messy quickly with papers etc all over the place. It’s not a place for precise work and speed is valued above all. In describing the work station I didn’t even mention scanning, taping and labelling of the package that has to happen in the same space too.
Some may argue it’s possible to be both fast and precise, but I would argue it’s not sustainable over an 8 hour shift.
Finally, similar to why potato crisps/chips have so much volume is that inefficient, or spacious, packing is generally better for transport as you are less likely to have goods damage each other from being too tightly packed together.
That’s why IMO generally things are packed sub-optimally from a space use perspective but actually optimally from a convenience and speed perspective.
"Not all retail" - for the place I worked at (doing "optimal" box packing), "box opening experience" was a big thing since it generally got shared on social media, etc. Hence there were constraints about not packing things on top of the feature item, all items had to be label upwards, "best-fit" box to look snug in photos, etc.
(but this place wasn't doing tens of thousands a day, I don't think)
From an engineering point of view, yes you can save so much packaging for the company and optimise for a delivery to be in fewer boxes, which is a fun problem to solve.
From a retail operations point of view the cost of packaging and shipping is negligible and why it’s so often discounted. The real costs though are labour.
Your pick and packing staff are basically all judged on throughput so if someone spends 5 minutes to pack an order in 1 well fitting box they will be fired if everyone else can pack 5 orders in the same 5 minutes.
Generally speaking your packer station is set up so they either have a terminal showing their packing list, a tub of goods to pack for one or more orders, and stacks of different sized boxes.
The stations usually get messy quickly with papers etc all over the place. It’s not a place for precise work and speed is valued above all. In describing the work station I didn’t even mention scanning, taping and labelling of the package that has to happen in the same space too.
Some may argue it’s possible to be both fast and precise, but I would argue it’s not sustainable over an 8 hour shift.
Finally, similar to why potato crisps/chips have so much volume is that inefficient, or spacious, packing is generally better for transport as you are less likely to have goods damage each other from being too tightly packed together.
That’s why IMO generally things are packed sub-optimally from a space use perspective but actually optimally from a convenience and speed perspective.