Amazon packaging gone mad

We’re sure that you’ve all by now had the experience of ordering a single item online only for it to arrive on your doorstep up in an enormous, oversized box or buried beneath a ludicrous amount of polystyrene. I have personally received boxes as large as a shoebox for a single videogame and spent the best part of five minutes trying to detach a single shrink-wrapped paperback book from a giant slab of cardboard that it was adhered to by Amazon’s over-zealous packing robots.

On Wednesday this week, however, a Japanese Twitter user may just have received the greatest example of surreal Amazon packaging yet.

Twitter user @howl0904, feeling the need for a little seasonal fruit, ordered a single kaki persimmon from the online superstore. It’s not the most common purchase ever, admittedly, but at least they’re getting some fruit in their diet.

When @howl0904′s doorbell rang the next day, though, they were surprised to find a courier holding an enormous box with both hands waiting for a signature of receipt. Carrying the incredibly light package into their apartment and setting it down on the middle of the floor, they ripped into the cardboard box to discover this:

amazon packaging reality

A single, sad piece of fruit tightly wrapped in plastic and fixed firmly to the centre of a box large enough to hold around 11 more. Bravo, Amazon JP; you have outdone yourself!

Naturally, Twitter users had plenty to say about this fine example of puzzling packaging:

- This… is just too surreal for words.

- Gotta love Amazon’s passion for packaging!

- What madness is this?

- Hahaha, who buys fruit online anyway!?

- Wait. You can buy persimmons on Amazon?

We have to admit that up until today we had no idea that Amazon sold fruit, either, but in a world where we can hire pop idols to come and clean our toilets, we shouldn’t really be surprised.

Granted, Amazon JP was probably not expecting many customers to order just one persimmon at a time, and, as shown on their listing page, most likely expected to ship the fruit by the crate, but even so, this is a kind of ridiculous. It’s great that the company ensures that the products it sells arrive safely, but putting a single piece of fruit in a box this big is almost like sending a single pair of socks across the world in a full-sized shipping container.

Source: 秒刊 Sunday

Howl