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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.

by rmunn16 hours ago|

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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.

by dpark20 hours ago|

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