[dpark]

Amazon did that with an earlier version of their grocery delivery service. I assume the cost and logistics of managing and cleaning the bins just wasn’t worth it because their grocery service delivers in paper bags now.

One problem with the bins for normal items is that rarely will they be packed to the brim. I imagine the overall item density would drop significantly if they started using standardized bins instead of appropriately sized boxes for the items.

[MikeTheGreat]

Well, if there's one company on Earth that's both incentivized to find an algorithm to efficient pack stuff into their shipping bins and also well-financed enough to actually figure out a good linear or quadratic-time algorithm to do so, it's definitely Amazon.

And once they do so they'll have solved two big problems! :)

[darksaints]

As someone who worked on logistics optimization algorithms for Amazon, I’ll just say that the one thing Amazon did best was have clueless upper management continuously make poor strategic decisions that continuously nullified all of their improvements from optimization.

[neilv]

What was the root cause of that? (Company consciously prioritized other things than those logistics optimizations? Individual incentives lead to management behavior that was against company's intent? Bad hiring and retention practices for upper management or whomever was informing them?)

[SllX]

They might have the ability to do so. The motivation? Well let me put it this way: I tried Amazon’s grocery delivery service, and stopped using it because everything—everything—kept arriving in its own individual bag regardless of whether it made any sense, so it was just a bunch of bags I had to carry upstairs. That bags also had no handles.

So they were optimizing for something, but it definitely wasn’t packaging efficiency.

[fc417fc802]

Or the alternative that I occasionally encounter with non-grocery items - giant heavy item and small delicate item placed together in same box that is far too large for the both of them. A token piece of packing paper or lone plastic bladder tossed in, free to move about. The entire contents bouncing around.

Another amusing one was when they packed a somewhat delicate pantry food item in a paper envelope. It arrived thoroughly crushed, exactly as one would expect.

[smelendez]

Yes. I recently tried ordering a standard cardboard tube box of oats from Amazon, and it arrived crushed and leaking in its presumably nonsterile paper envelope. They gave me a refund and told me to throw it out.

I think this would have been much less likely to happen without the envelope, since whoever packed the truck would intuitively pack the tube vertically.

[dpark]

Optimizing for dollar cost. Human time costs more than the extra packaging.

Results would doubtless be different if they were optimizing for minimal environmental impact or produced waste.

[andrewljohnson]

Bin packing is theoretically NP Hard but practically solved all the time on real world datasets.

[datadrivenangel]

Yeah but NP Hard bin packing doesn't usually include situations where a flat screen TV squished on top of pallets comes sliding out of the truck when you go to unload...

Breakage results.

[andrewljohnson]

This sounds like a constraint I model in my bin packing optimization routine.

[kjellsbells]

I see what you did there. Touché.

[llbbdd]

I used this service before it rolled out widely and these boxes were a mixed bag. On one hand they worked really well, they were essentially insulated hard totes with styrofoam lining and often had dry ice in them for anything that needed to be kept cold. On the other hand, I lived in an apartment, so storing 3-4 totes for a week or more was a real chore.

The funniest thing I remember though is that the totes weren't optimized for the size of some of the products available very well - if you put a frozen pizza in it, it sat diagonally, and without enough room to really put anything above or below it. You order four frozen pizzas, and you're allocating many cubic meters of apartment space for them until the next time you order.

[dpark]

They must have been using different crates for you (different region or perhaps era). For me they were standard plastic bins[1] with a separate “cold bag” inside for frozen stuff. No actual styrofoam I recall, although this was also over 10 years ago so I could be misremembering.

[1] https://www.uline.com/Product/Detail/S-9745G

[llbbdd]

The style of plastic bin definitely looks the same. The ones we were getting looked something like this[0], same folding-flap top as in your link but form-fitted insulation inside:

[0] https://flexcontainer.com/product/insulated-molded-container...

[dpark]

Yeah. I’m not certain if the Amazon ones were actually the same as the ones I linked. But extremely similar at least.

It’s been a long time. Very plausible that we did get the ones with the styrofoam sometimes and I just don’t remember. I know we got the cooler bag sometime.

[spockz]

Our groceries from AH in NL come in foldable crates. The cooled items sit inside a plastic bag inside a foam box in the truck. The delivery person stacks the crates and foam boxes, brings them to your door, rings the bell. They hand the bag with cooled products to you and then you get the crates. You return the folded crates. This works just fine. They are also quite adept at filling the crates to a maximum. Unfortunately not always in the smartest way because they sometimes put the fragile things at the bottom and the heavy items like bottles of soda on top.

So this seems like a pretty solved problem. Of course you have to be home to receive the cooled products. There are some startups that sell cooled boxes that delivery persons can open with a code to put stuff in but they are not popular. Since Covid people tend to be at home more often than before.

[Spooky23]

That service was really weird. They had a special arrangement with the post office.

They’d slice cold cuts in New Jersey, and have USPS bring it to upstate NY and deliver before 8AM. There would literally be a mail van with two orders in it.

[newaccountman2]

OIC.

I will note like the other person though that I often get like "just one thing in a box that's clearly too big"

[rmunn]

I have been told, by (if I'm remembering my source right) someone who has worked as a UPS driver for 30+ years, that Amazon does that on purpose. Because the variable they're optimizing for is not "are we wasting cardboard". Cardboard is a renewable resource, which also recycles really well, so a little wasted cardboard is not a big deal. What they're optimizing for is packing the truck. Your item arrived in a too-big box, because that box (and the air within it) was calculated to fit exactly into what would otherwise have been empty space in the truck if the box had been smaller. In other words, you know how sometimes inside a carboard box, you'll find the item you ordered plus another smaller (and empty) cardboard box used for filler space? That's exactly what they were doing, with your box as the filler space in the truck so that other boxes wouldn't slide around and damage their contents.

... I see someone else has posted this elsewhere in the comment thread. Eh, I might as well post this anyway, because it's confirmation from a different source.

[ssl-3]

That's a concept that might make sense, and it is something that I've heard from others over the years.

Except: The hypothetical perfectly-packed 53' trailer that leaves the originating warehouse is not the same trailer that delivers stuff to my doorstep. Things get sorted and re-sorted as they move along. It ultimately becomes random instead of optimized, and these random giant boxes take up a lot of space in local delivery vehicles.

Besides, the exceptions can be too exceptional to support any notion of it being deliberate.

It's difficult to describe the biggest box I've ever gotten from Amazon, except to say that it was too big to fit onto the seat of the recliner by the door where I usually put these things. I've received full-size, assembled, 1990s tower PCs in smaller boxes.

Inside of that exceptional box was just 3 ethernet cables, each 1 foot long, that cost me less than $1 each. That whole box could have been a brown paper envelope.

[newAccount2025]

The other boxes would slide around anyways after your box was delivered tho?

[rmunn]

Yes, but by that time you're driving the truck around neighborhood streets, getting up to 25 mph at most before you stop at the next stop sign. Not nearly as much force being applied as making turns at 55 mph. During the long drive from the warehouse to that city (and the specific neighborhood), the boxes are packed in tightly.

Plus, I seem to recall that they also optimize by giving the driver a route to follow and planning the boxes to be packed in order, so that only one row is being emptied at a time. I know my UPS driver friend has told me UPS does this, and it's an obvious optimization so I'm sure Amazon does it too.

[rcleveng]

and webvan back in 2000 - both amazon's attempt and webvan are unfortunately gone - it's cheaper to throw away packaging away, and that's super unfortunate and sad.

[scrame]

I quite often get inappropriately sized boxes.

[danudey]

I remember reading somewhere that the boxes are not sized to the items they contain, but to a combination of 'items they contain' and 'space we need the box to take up on the truck'; i.e. if you have five items of one unit size in a six-unit-wide truck they will slide around (and potentially get damaged, fall over, etc), but if you put one of those items in a two-unit-size box then the boxes will not slide around, meaning that while the box is inefficiently sized in isolation it is optimally sized in a logistical context.

I'm not sure how true this is, nor how reasonable it sounds since I don't know what the inside of an Amazon delivery truck looks like, but it sounds like the sort of thing that could be true in some circumstances.

[rmunn]

I had heard the same thing from (if I'm remembering correctly about who told me) someone who has driven a UPS delivery van for 30+ years, so he has loads of experience with truck-packing. If he thinks it's true, I'm willing to believe him.

And if I'm wrong about my source, the other person who I could possibly have heard it from is my friend who works at Amazon. As a sysadmin managing a small part of AWS, not in delivery — but he would also be in a position to know.

Either way, I believe that's correct, that the oversized boxes are that size because they were being used as filler in the truck. The algorithm calculates the planned truck packing based on what items are going to be transported together (going to the same city therefore in the same truck), then picks out the box size that each item should go into. And most of them will be correctly sized, but in each row either zero or one (or possibly more in some cases) will be oversized.

[dpark]

I do too, but also sometimes the boxes are the correct size. With standardized bins I imagine they would rarely be reasonable.