By Eric Fergusson

Amazon has been hailed as the fulfilment flag bearer for retail in recent weeks. Their endless fulfilment options and rapid delivery times, plus the recent notion of anticipatory shipping, make them hard to beat in the fulfilment arena, and rightly so.

After recently watching a BBC documentary on Amazon and their retail revolution, it gave me a new appreciation for their slick fulfilment operation.  Their fulfilment centres, where products are organised randomly to increase efficiency, are a thing of marvel.  Amazon’s central computer system knows exactly where all one hundred million or so products that Amazon sells are at all times. When an order is received it calculates the best fulfilment centre to ship from and sends it to an ‘Amazonian’ picker’s individual scanner. It will then tell the picker where to find the product and even what size box the order should be packed into. Clever indeed.

With this in mind, I was more than surprised by my most recent order from Amazon (pictured below).

As you can see the packaging is nearly four times the size of the actual product. It puts one of Amazon’s fourteen leadership principles into question- frugality. I’m sure you’ll agree packing a product into packaging that could house another three of the same item doesn’t seem to meet the frugal standards that Amazon so proudly lives by.

Amazon is undoubtedly the eTail giant of the world, but where many would claim it can do no wrong, I and the trees of the Amazon rainforest, would beg to differ.