[masraum]

Originally Posted by gchappel

I needed a 1.4x teleconverter, basically a $600 lens attachment. My normal source would take too long and amazon had it in 2 days. Arrived today.
A $600 fragile fairly high tech item is in its normal box, packed in a padded envelope. No other packaging, just the product box in a padded envelope. Box was battered, but item seems ok.
My wife ordered 2 skeins of yarn through amazon. The yarn comes in a cardboard box with the air pillow packing material filling the rest of the box.
I guess they did not want the yarn to break, but sure didn't care at all about a lens.
Nuts.
Gary

Ouch, glad it appears to be healthy. The good news is that the Camera folks usually package their stuff really well.

Originally Posted by stevej37

I doubt Amazon has any say in the packaging.
The seller would be the one.
Just my opinion.

Not the packaging of the device, the packing that the item was put in for shipping.

Originally Posted by Porsche-O-Phile

I especially love tiny items coming in gargantuan boxes. I bought some motorcycle gloves a couple of months ago and they came in a box big enough to fit a couple of basketballs. With padding. 🙄

At least the cats got a new box to sleep / play in for a few days.

We had a thread here where someone knew someone that worked in one of the Amazon warehouses. They said that speed is paramount, and if you got to a small item and only had a big box available, it was better (speed-wise) to just stick the item in the big box than it was to go back to the boxes and try to find a box the right size.

Based on experience, I'll bet that some folks that are a little lazy grab a bunch of padded envelopes of various sizes and try to put as much as possible into those for speed/efficiencies sake with less concern for the item arriving undamaged. Amazon probably assumes some shipping issues, and as long as you come in under their average, you're probably ok.