And once they do so they'll have solved two big problems! :)
So they were optimizing for something, but it definitely wasn’t packaging efficiency.
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.
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.
Results would doubtless be different if they were optimizing for minimal environmental impact or produced waste.
Breakage results.
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.
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.
I will note like the other person though that I often get like "just one thing in a box that's clearly too big"
... 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.
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.
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.
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.
[0] https://flexcontainer.com/product/insulated-molded-container...
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.
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.
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.