A small box with my name upon it, sitting on the shelf in our shipping department for me to pick up. The procedure is simple… Grab the box and note your receipt on the clipboard hanging at the end of the shelf.
What is it this time? I open the box, open one bag, take out the anitstatic bag within that and find… A ribbon cable.
I just have to sit back and stare at this in sheer disbelief.
The disbelief has been building for a week now as the boxes have appeared in our shipping department one by one. A single order, a pair of A/D units and accessories. I have now received four separate boxes, all delivered FedEx, and not received the actual A/D systems themselves, only the various accessories.
One box with three double bagged ribbon cables that weigh all of a few ounces each and are ten inches long. All of the accessories I have received in the four boxes could easily have fit in one box. The anti-static bag is even more unbelievable. These metallized mylar bags are not cheap. Why would you put one around a component that is totally immune to static damage? A ribbon cable with connectors at each end? To be static sensitive it would have to at least contain a semiconductor component of some sort. One transistor? Then you seal a poly bag around that? At least it was brown paper and not foam peanuts used to fill the rest of the box.
With this order National Instruments has by far topped the worst overpackaging I have seen to date. Quite something in the electronics industry where overpackaging is the norm. It used to be Digikey was the worst I had ever seen, but they have gotten much better over the last few years, shifting to all brown paper packaging aside from the plastic bag around the parts themselves.
How is it even possible to receive a small order in four separate FedEx shipments and not even get the primary thing you ordered? To Hawaiʻi? How can you construct a shipping system that inefficient and make any profit after paying the shipping bills? It is not like any of the accessories do me any good without the main units, no need to rush them. One box with everything would be quite acceptable.
Still waiting for the A/D units. Maybe tomorrow?
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I submit http://gizmodo.com/5995419/why-is-amazon-packaging-so-dumb
On the other extreme, I once bought a hard drive from an independent Amazon seller and it was tossed in a large box with no padding or protection whatsoever. The hard drive was of course completely dead on arrival, and despite waging war against the seller, I never did get a full refund.