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I ordered a box of boxes from The Packaging Wholesalers via Amazon.ca
- Animats 7y agoOrder from Uline instead. Those guys are probably just reselling Uline. Compare the Uline box ordering page [1]. Looks rather similar to Packaging Wholesalers, doesn't it? Order direct from Uline, and you'll probably get a better price. It's hard to tell, because "Packaging Wholesalers" won't show prices until you log in, while Uline has theirs visible. Uline only sells shipping and warehouse products. They're #1 in North America in a dull, boring, and essential business. No way will you get granola. If you're ordering in industrial quantities, order from an industrial supplier. [1] https://www.uline.com/product/GuidedNav?t=184360 https://www.uline.com/product/GuidedNav?t=184360
- throwaway284534 7y agoJust a heads up. The Uline management has made significant donations to political organizations against equality of marriage, universal health care, worker's rights, and cannabis legalization. Regardless of your stance, I would consider the consequences of supporting their lobbying efforts.
- jellicle 7y agoA little bit of a non-standard sort of HN post, but it illustrates an interesting sort of system failure. My speculation, never having set foot in an Amazon warehouse: 1) Amazon stockers are told to put the incoming inventory in a spot, and scan all visible barcodes on the product, which are all associated with that product in Amazon's DB henceforth. Normally extraneous barcodes are no problem because they aren't SKUs, so no one ever tries to pick them by the extra codes. Easier to tell the stockers to scan everything than to try to get them to pick the right one. 2) Company X, Y, Z ship their products to Amazon with their own barcodes and fail to remove the box company codes. Dozens of different random products around the warehouse end up with a secondary, identical barcode associated with them. 3) Someone orders boxes. Inventory system probably automatically sends pickers to the closest source of SKU 12345, of which there are - unusually - many scattered around the warehouse. So the product received is essentially random, out of whoever uses these boxes. Product roulette! 4) Customer service can't solve this problem. Maybe there's someone in Amazon's inventory team that can go in and fix it, but it occurred for good reasons! Everyone was behaving rationally. There are probably other similar problems in the database as well.
- dylan604 7y agoThis reminds me of a problem I ran into in a previous life. It has nothing to do with inventory control, but all about how clean/sane is thd data you are storing in the database. We had a system with a set of webUI based forms used by non-technical users to use to add info to the database. However, the forms were outdated, and were importing bad default values. The devs told me they felt that bad data was better than no data. I laughed out loud at the reversed logic. It did nothing but cause grief, and was only solved (for me) by my no longer working for that company.
- p1necone 7y agoEveryone was behaving rationally maybe the first two times this happened. After that though someone should have double checked the outgoing package. #4 is really by far the biggest problem here. No matter what, with a company of Amazons size things are going to go wrong that just cant be solved in an automated fashion. They need support with the training and authorization to escalate issues like this to staff that have the power to fix them.
- egypturnash 7y agoAmazon has absolutely no memory. All of your customer support woes go to people working from a script. The likelihood of getting the same customer support person is zero. You can get an actual human who can look at what’s going on if you send email to Bezos; that gets forwarded to the secret support team that can actually make decisions instead of just following a script. Or at least you could a few years ago.
- adamcharnock 7y agoJust a thought, could this be engineered to work in one’s favour? For example, order a box of something expensive, receive it, attach a barcode for something cheap which is low in stock / rarely ordered, then send it back. Now order the thing you labelled it as, and see what turns up. Perhaps you’ll get a box of Epyc CPUs for the price of a box of out of season kwanza decorations.
- 7y ago
- nwrk 7y agoGuess, you just saved them >$10M of wrong orders ? 8. Today I figured out the problem. The granola company and the coaster company buy THEIR boxes from the same people I'm trying to by mine from. And the barcode scanners at @amazonca are picking up the old sticker - from the box company!
- tcbawo 7y agoyou would think the granola and coaster companies would have caught on when they started receiving their own products instead of more boxes.
- twic 7y agoUnless a box of boxes costs less than they can sell a box of granola or coasters for, in which case this is the ultimate free money machine.
- Scoundreller 7y ago> 11. I responded, with honesty: "The error has been fixed? It wasn't fixed the first three times.. so I'm skeptical!" > @amazonca responded: "You will get the correct item. I do not want any more hassles for you. Please do not worry. " > So I re-ordered the @PkgWholesalers boxes... ... and got packages of granola again in 1 PkgWholesalers boxes. I hate how frustrating it can be do convince a multijillion dollar company that, No, they are wrong, and I am right. It's like we need an "No, I actually need you to help because they problem is unsolvable from my Point-of-View phone number" that's kept a secret from anyone. Had a similar issue with my credit union where they referred to a payment number entry field the wrong way. I managed to schedule a call with someone, and they didn't understand the problem. They said: "So you want us to change this just for you?". My answer of "No, I want you to change it for everybody." didn't go over well...
- dwighttk 7y ago>I hate how frustrating it can be do convince a multijillion dollar company that, No, they are wrong, and I am right. If it were easier, then a lot of people who were wrong would be convincing the company that they were right and they wouldn't be a multijillion dollar company for long.
- wizardforhire 7y agoUsed to be that getahuman[1] was a thing, but like all good things on the Internet it seems to have not been able to hold up to the sheer volume of bad actors. [1] https://gethuman.com/ https://gethuman.com/
- foobarbecue 7y agoExcept for the miracle of Wikipedia
- lopmotr 7y agoKind of, but I wonder about niche articles with nobody keeping an eye on them. I have notifications for a small page that contains some empirical formulas which contain arbitrary constants. Every now and then, somebody will modify one of them so it looks similar but is completely wrong. What if I wasn't keeping an eye on it? Readers would never know they were seeing wrong information.
- megablast 7y ago> "You will get the correct item. I do not want any more hassles for you. Please do not worry. " Said by someone who did not understand the problem at all.
- wruza 7y agoThat’s the same situation when we shipped code with “I swear this time it works correctly with all new excessive to-the-point tests we wrote after analyzing the last failure in detail” label. Understanding the problem in a complex automated system doesn’t always make it disappear overnight.
- celticmusic 7y agoReminds me a little of a recent experience I had. My gf wanted a little Japanese plushie so I bought it for her. I don't recall the exact amount, but I bought 2 of them for roughly $100. A few weeks later we get a large box FULL of varying types of these plushies. After doing some research we find out there was some issue with a new shipping company and they were sending orders to the wrong addresses and so forth. The plushie company basically just said "if you receive it, keep it", and they're currently taking this shipping company to court over it. Well.... for the next several months every once in a while we'd receive boxes of varying sizes full of different types of plushies. Some of them are recognizable, such as Dragon Quest slime plushies, other's are little food based plushies. I don't know what they are, but like anthropomorphized bread and so forth. At one point my girlfried tallied it up and I think we received over $3k (retail) worth of these plushies.
- barbs 7y agoWow. Did you try to sell them on?
- celticmusic 7y agoShe's planning on it, we've sold a few but put it on hiatus while she visits friends. edit: family, not friends... brainfart.
- userbinator 7y agoI have a friend who ordered one USB cable (not from Amazon, but one of the Chinese companies) for a few dollars, and received a crate of 500. The seller said the same thing, noting that it would cost more to have them shipped back. He tried somewhat unsuccessfully to sell them locally, then just gave them away to everyone he knew (including me). I guess the way things tend to be is that if you order online, sometimes you lose, and sometimes you win...
- coreyhn 7y agoI applaud your patience
- scottlamb 7y ago> 8. Today I figured out the problem. The granola company and the coaster company buy THEIR boxes from the same people I'm trying to by mine from. And the barcode scanners at @amazonca are picking up the old sticker - from the box company! So the granola company, coaster company, etc. forgot to remove the old bar codes from the outermost box before packing it full of their own product and sending it out. One could tell them this, but there will probably always be more small companies making this mistake. Probably what should happen is for Amazon to mark this item (the box of boxes) as requiring special handling when scanning on entry into the warehouse, verifying that it actually is a box of boxes (right weight, no other barcode, etc), and explaining why. And audit all the ones currently in the warehouse. I have no idea how to convince Amazon to do this. Like the author, I'd give up and start buying my boxes elsewhere.
- janee 7y agoWeight or volume is also another metric that could possibly be employed, i.e. save the weight and rough volume of each item being scanned...when there's a significant deviation for an product that's shown no or litte deviation in the past, flag it for manual inspection? Probably too costly for such an edge case problem though
- pmorici 7y agoThe seller of the boxes could fix this by putting an outer wrapping on the boxes to which they affix the label so that there was no way for the label to stay on the box.
- djannzjkzxn 7y agoI think the error mostly benefits the seller of the boxes, or at least doesn’t hurt them, so they won’t have much incentive to fix it.
- sarvind 7y agoThey are losing a whole lot of valuable sales through this channel, not to mention seeing a higher than average return/refund rate that could flag some risk alerts. So there's plenty of incentive to fix it - although this sort of thing could presumably be pretty hard for them to detect, troubleshoot and rectify.
- exabrial 7y agoHilariously, there's no way anymore to get help from any "real" person over at Amazon anymore, even for Prime members. I've gotten all kinds of weird stuff shipped to me, including a $12,000 server motherboard once, which Amazon told me I was free to keep as they would ship out the $124 SSD I ordered. I insisted that I return it, and after much hassle over several weeks, I was finally able get ahold of a non-chatbot, non-foreign service rep that finally took the time to listen and sent me a return label. Since I finally got ahold of someone real, I remarked this is the last time I go through such a hassle to return their property because of the way they treated me when I was trying to do them a favor.
- goodells 7y agoI've had good luck calling the main Amazon customer support number (USA) and simply asking to speak to someone in the United States of America. I don't know how Amazon's systems work, but they seem to have more options available to them than the foreign call center reps.
- nuclearnice1 7y agoWhy did you insist on retuning it?
- exabrial 7y agoThe right thing to do. But my time and sanity is valuable too.
- nuclearnice1 7y agoYeah maybe take the company that does $283,000 in sales per minute at their word when they say don’t bother returning it. They told you not to do it. You did it. Now you’re pissed that doing it wasn’t a smooth process. Ok.
- mcbutterbunz 7y agoHe’s the customer (or she). If he doesn’t want the wrong item that was shipped, amazon should accept the return. I know this is HN but now this dudes gotta figure out what to do with a 12K server does he use it? Does he toss it? How much does it cost to dispose of a server like that. Maybe he donates it. I don’t know but he didn’t ask for it the trouble. It’s not like he won the lottery for $12K. The customer asked for one thing but the company delivered something else. Don’t make your customers deal with your mistake.
- mkeeter 7y agoAt one point, my parents bought a toilet from Amazon, and got along with it a 12-foot long balance beam. Trying to return it was a bit of an ordeal: https://kkeeter.wordpress.com/2014/06/02/dear_amazon/ https://kkeeter.wordpress.com/2014/06/02/dear_amazon/
- roel_v 7y agoLoved that. This quote just sums up customer support in 2020 (and, apparently, also in 2014): Me 'Hi- I just called about a 12 foot balance beam delivered to me – along with my toilet – in error. Are you the one I talked to?' 'No' Me- 'Excellent!'
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- balladeer 7y agoI wish I could get such to the point responses (as simple as "No") while interacting with customer care.
- hyperdimension 7y agoThank you very much for commenting, and I'm sorry to hear about your concern, 'balladeer. I empathize with your desire for short, pithy responses to questions posed to customer care, and hope that you're having an otherwise great day. Thank you for being a loyal HN customer. Can I get your account number to get started?
- colejohnson66 7y agoThere’s actually laws regarding stuff sent to you in error. Basically, they can’t ask you to return it unless you offer. Hence why there’s probably no formalized process for it.
- userbinator 7y agoIt should also not come as a surprise that a company whose process is highly optimised to move product in one direction has problems dealing with unusual situations in the other direction.
- gnicholas 7y agonow just have to figure out what box company Amazon's fine jewelry vendors use...
- adonovan 7y agoTune in for next week's installment: how I threw out a garbage can!
- 0xff00ffee 7y agoOh I gotta hear this...
- slavik81 7y agoMy brother once told me a story about an auto plant in Ontario and their industrial-sized bins. They had a huge metal recycling bin, big enough to fit a few cars inside, and a smaller garbage bin, maybe two-thirds that size. One day, after emptying the trash bin, the garbage truck driver stacked it inside the recycling bin. The next day, the truck came and recycled the trash bin.
- AmVess 7y agoI reuse Amazon boxes, and now I feel vindicated that I always fully obscure the old bar codes.
- aaron695 7y agoI don't get the theory why? So the Granola company buys boxes, puts in the product, sends it back to Amazon, then Amazon accidentally puts it into the boxes pile? Except wouldn't it be a boxes of boxes pile? Is the Granola company recycling the outer box?
- girvo 7y agoI believe the way it works is the warehouse worker is given a number/barcode which they scan, which tells them where the item is. As the barcode has been reused by accident, the worker is pointed towards the box of granola which has the same barcode as the box of boxes!
- mturmon 7y agoMy further dystopian riff is that the reason for the scan-bar reuse is: They have a robot cycling around the warehouse, automatically indexing the items for sale by scanning all codes in sight, uploading to a database...that is used by other automated pickers. On average, you still make a profit even if the wrong thing happens sometimes.
- aaron695 7y agoThe fact it's a box of boxes is a mcguffin I think. It could be a box of widgets and what happens is exactly the same. Except a box of boxes goes to the box department, hence why they reuse it, for everyone else it's easier to throw it out the box. In fact I don't think a box holding boxes is the same size, so it's a new sized box. Probably why they keep it. Side interest: You would think scanner would see two bar codes and error. But there must be something slow in scanning per side so you quit after it's found. But I thought the tech would scan every side at once for speed.
- alyx 7y agoMight be related to what is described by the scam here, https://youtu.be/2IT2oAzTcvU https://youtu.be/2IT2oAzTcvU
- robjan 7y agoThe eighth tweet in the story explains the cause
- unnamed76ri 7y agoLast year my son ordered a Nerf gun. It came but so did an $800 portable refrigerator. I tried three times to do the right thing and send it back but they told me to keep it. Ended up selling it on eBay.
- MagnumPIG 7y agoI don't often get to use the word kafkaesque... This is kafkaesque.
- anarazel 7y agoI got a box with several items I ordered (damaged), but also a bunch of metal piping (bent), two lsat training books (damaged), and a bunch of other crap I can't remember. IIRC the stuff I ordered was a filing cabinet or something of that sort - heavy. It was quite hard to convince them that no, I don't just want to throw it all in the trash. Multiple calls etc. I can kinda get how you one ends up reading the wrong labels, but throwing in additional stuff requiring considerably larger packaging?
- abrax3141 7y agoI once ordered some sheet music. I don’t remrber exactly how many pages it was, maybe 10 or 20. It came in the biggest box I think I’ve ever received, from anyone. Literally there was a thin booklet floating around in a - approx. 3ftx2ftx2ft box. (Sadly, no packing peanuts! :-) I should have taken a picture.
- chihuahua 7y agoThere used to be a team at Amazon whose mission was to prevent this situation. The technical term was "grotesque packaging". I assume they eventually gave up trying to solve the problem.
- thaumasiotes 7y agoWell, in the last couple of years they seem to have shifted from shipping books in a box with padding to shipping them in tight-fitting envelopes that damage the corners. So I guess that's a victory for the grotesque packaging team, at the same time it's a big loss for people who want to buy books on Amazon. :/
- dmurray 7y agoI usually get them wrapped in a thick piece of cardboard, a few inches longer than the book so an impact to the corners of the package doesn't damage the book. It works pretty well.
- thaumasiotes 7y agoI know the style you're referring to; that works fine. But I've been getting books delivered in bubble-padded manila envelopes. In one case, I set up a return for the damaged book, explicitly noted that the packaging was inappropriate, was assured the problem would be fixed, and the next three (!) replacement deliveries were also shipped in the stupid manila envelope and, of course, damaged. They never shipped me an undamaged copy; I gave up after their messaging went from "return the earlier book" to "don't bother; just keep everything".
- dusted 7y agoWelcome to the future indeed :) This sort of thing is somehow going to end up getting someone killed.
- Geeflow 7y agoNot removing old labels before entering something into (partially) automated systems is just asking for trouble. A friend of mine once returned an item to amazon but forgot to remove the original shipping label. The shipping company picked it up and promptly shipped it back to him instead of returning it to Amazon.
- raverbashing 7y agoThis reminds me of some self-checkout experiences where the scanner wouldn't pick the barcode on the pack (4-pack) but it would pick the barcode of the product inside the pack (which are not usually sold separately but oh well...). Cue having to call the assistance to back on that purchase and scan the right one. Happened a couple of times. I think I just actively started covering the wrong barcodes or got a different product.
- mhandley 7y agoAccording to amazon.ca, the granola costs $63 and the box of boxes only costs $29. I really hope the granola company is buying as many boxes of boxes from Amazon as they can! Free money!
- fest 7y agoThe way to get Amazon to fix this (at least on this particular item) is just that- publish an article that you get granola (which I assume costs more) for the price of empty boxes. Nature (i.e. the internet) will fix the problem for you by creating a large loss for Amazon/stock discrepancy.
- jrockway 7y agoSomething similar happened to me about ... 10 years ago. This was back when everyone was going on and on about how good Amazon's customer support was, but what I noticed is that they don't actually listen to the customer, they're just robots that give you money for talking to them. The customer only comes out ahead if their Internet connection is free and their time is worth $0/hour. But people love it! In my case, I ordered road bike tires. They shipped me mountain bike tires from the same manufacturer. This was hilarious because the road tires were "folding" (they have a kevlar bead instead of a wire bead, so don't take up as much space in shipping) but the mountain bike tires weren't, so the set of 2 tires arrived in a refrigerator-sized box. I opened a ticket with Amazon. "Oh sorry, we'll send you the right item." Same mountain bike tires arrive. "Oh sorry, we'll refund you for both." This was about 2 weeks later and I checked the product page... everyone in the reviews section was complaining, but Amazon took no action to fix it. Like the author of this Twitter thread, I finally ventured to a bike shop that I heard was really good, and they were really good. I never bought another bike part from Amazon. If I were Amazon, I would be super alarmed that people "in the field" don't have the ability to talk to people in the back office. Every one of these incidents should be a ticket for the supply chain management team. But instead the customer service team looks at CSAT scores, the warehouse team probably looks at "average time to pack an item", and the investors look for growth. Nobody cares if the business runs well, just that each individual department set an arbitrary metric and met it. If you want to eat a big company's lunch, this is how you do it: look at the business as a whole, not as a million parts that don't work together. (See also: Google and 5 chat apps, Google WiFi vs. Google Fiber WiFi, etc.)
- jaifraic 7y agoI wonder i you could exploit this 'bug'. Offer some cheap bought products for way to much money via Amazon. Boxed in wholesale boxes with clearly visible original barcode. No one ever will buy your product, but it will be sent out in error, customers can keep it and Amazon reimburses you for it. Repeat for profit.
- IgorPartola 7y agoOnce bought spark plugs for my car from Amazon. I got three new ones and three from the Amazon Warehouse since those were about 30% cheaper and I figured what could be wrong with spark plugs? Got the right box, wrong spark plugs. Returned them. Re-ordered. Got the same spark plugs. This time I marked the boxes with and plugs with a permanent marker. Returned them and reordered. Got the exact same ones. Finally returned and ordered new ones. I am sure those same plugs are still in the mail going back and forth between Amazon and frustrated customers years later.
- racnid 7y agoMinor plug for a vendor I've used with great success for a long time: Rock Auto, don't even try to deal with Amazon for specific parts. Their website is a nice throw back to actual usability too.
- IgorPartola 7y agoYes! I have ordered parts from them before and they are fantastic both on selection and price. 10/10.
- SaltPork 7y agoRemember when a someone ordered a TV from Amazon and received a Assault Rifle? https://gizmodo.com/guy-orders-tv-from-amazon-gets-giant-assault-rifle-ins-5933021 https://gizmodo.com/guy-orders-tv-from-amazon-gets-giant-ass...
- Timpy 7y agoI once ordered a 20' cable on Amazon, a 10' was delivered. I double checked my order to make sure I wasn't the one who had made a mistake, then returned my 10' in exchange for a 20'. They sent me another 10' cable. I contacted customer service and told them something in their process must be wrong, to please carefully ensure that they understand I want a 20' cable, and ensure that a 20' cable is sent to me. This probably went unread. They sent me a 10' cable, then asked for a nice review. I returned the cable for a refund and took my business elsewhere.
- easytiger 7y agoMy wife had an interesting issue in the UK with Amazon very recently. I order a lot from Amazon. A lot. 99% of all packages turn up same or next day no issues. My wife started ordering some things and they kept going missing. We compared addresses and they were identical. Order tracking kept showing a delivery date, then the date came and the item was just returned to warehouse. Repeat 5x times and after many 40 min phone calls she just cancelled the order for a refund. Repeat 7 or 8 times. Phoning up the Indian based call centre helped not at all. Hours wasted She tried one last time and got a call back from a manager in the UK who looked into it. After a week or was resolved. I still don't have a technical explanation, but apparently some special routing meta data had been added to that address where the package was always routed through another logistics centre or something. Total nightmare getting it sorted out
- Zenst 7y agoIt would appear that whilst Amazon have saved on Thrift overheads, they have in essence, automated it upon themselves as so many items they send by mistake and they don't collect appear to be more common than isolated instances.
- blaines 7y agoJust today this happened to me! I ordered a 6 pack of batteries and got a box of 6 packs of batteries. Now I’ve got enough for the rest of my life! I had already read this thread, and first thing I check is the barcodes. The box of packs of batteries has the same barcode as the package of batteries itself. https://twitter.com/blaines/status/1227430981134516224?s=20 https://twitter.com/blaines/status/1227430981134516224?s=20