“We lose money on every sale but make it up in volume!”, or packaging panic in the midst of a bot-powered mania.

Let’s just preface this post with the fact that I have great admiration for Jeff Bezos as a founder, visionary, manager, and leader. He’s built one of the world’s leading web-based companies and his ruthless pursuit of efficiency strikes fear into every segment of retail.

But even ruthless efficiency needs to mind its gaps.i Id est my latest deliveries from Amazon featuring a set of three (3x) 37cm(l) x 21cm(w) x 18cm(h) and one (1x) 45cm(l) x 37cm(w) x 21cm(h) brown cardboard boxes.

The order ? A paltry six (6) Love Child Organic Purees-Super Blends-Apples Bananas Blueberries, 128ml.ii A hilariously small quantity of “snack packs,” of which my boys go through 5/day/kid, but that was the max I could order of this “Add-On” item at the time.iii Oh, how far away that moment now seems, here, two long, long weeks later.iv But the stranger part of the story comes when one box arrived last Friday containing two packages of six snack packs (twelve total), then two more identically-sized boxes arrived the following Tuesday containing, get this, one snack pack each, and then on Wednesday, somehow, someway, another box, double the size of the earlier ones and containing twenty fucking feet of bubble wrap arrives with three more fucking snack packs inside. Like, excuse me ?v

Snack Pack Box - 1

Snack Pack Box - 2

In total, not only did I receive seventeen snack packs for the price of six, but they arrived in an absurd number of under-filled boxes, each of which would cost retail customers $15-20 to ship. Amazon surely has a sweet deal with Canada Post, but it’s still awfully hard to make up for per unit losses with volume.

Or am I missing something here ?
___ ___ ___

  1. Mind the gap!

    Mind The Gap

  2. I placed the order for the snack packs on February 27th. Amazon is now sold out in that flavour, but don’t worry, you can still buy single packs, which normally retail for a little under CAD $2, for the bargain basement price of CAD $23.88!!! Don’t you just love bot-powered surge pricing ?

    Amazon Snack Pack Prices - March 11, 2020

    …as of March 11, 2020.

  3. When we were doing our “month’s supply” calculations recently, we came to the shocking realisation that we needed over 300 of these fucking little astronaut food packages. Christ Almighty! It’s perfectly easy to miss the impressive quantities of food we consume in our house when we’re accustomed to having groceries delivered to our door 2-3 times per week and The Girl and I eat out an average of a meal per day. So those groceries are 75% for the kids! No wonder they’re veritable giants

    But thank goodness we struck while the iron was hot. We might not be overflowing in useless hand sanitizer and poorly fitting face masks, but we’re okay in the home essentials dept for now. Taleb wasn’t kidding when he said that it’s better to panic early.

  4. How was my trip to Las Vegas, where my non-linear extrapolator kept me up at night for the first time in seven years… how was that only six weeks ago ??! 
  5. Or more aptly…

    nigga wut meme

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