[1] In an ironic twist, I absolutely refuse to buy books from Amazon anymore.
It just feels so wasteful to save money by mishandling everything to the point where it doesn't even matter if stuff breaks because it is cheaper to try a 2nd time.
Costco's return policy alone is a big advantage. Plus they have so many TVs in the store where you can see them in operation.
Let's say that Amazon sends out 100 books, and 1 or 2 get damaged. But if they add some extra bit of packaging to every single one of those 100 books, zero will get damaged.
Did this save cost or materials? I don't know, it depends on how much extra packaging was needed, whether the damage was serious enough to initiate a refund/re-send, and whether adding packaging to every single order was less environmentally impactful than having to print and send an extra book to those who received damaged ones.
It's going to be a simple dollar value equation for companies like Amazon, and make no mistake, they have the data and have made these decisions consciously.
It's like how throwing produce away at the grocery store is "a waste" but the system is cost-effective.
And anyway, if Amazon has to ship extra books, they pay the publisher an extra time, and you can always donate the damaged book as well.
I suspect they're not counting the damage this is doing to their brand. I've kept items that were slightly damaged, but it slowly eroded my trust in Amazon. Now I avoid Amazon if I can help it.
Just because externalities are ignored doesn't prove anything in particular if you don't know the relative change.
That's a general fact about the world, that making decisions on incomplete information does not necessarily produce worse results. Sometimes things turn out better than you expected and sometimes worse.
People are often significantly biased, but that's separate from the issue of not taking "everything" into account.
It also seems obviously wrong to say that a negative externality is or should be considered in isolation. It's just silly to say that people who experience negative things only experience negative things or that any category of things that includes negative things must be net negative.
Had something like that happen to me, and for the product, it was a shock. I had ordered the item, it said it was delivered, but it never made it to me. I contact CS (via chat) and they said they would send out another one. I said ok - what happens if the old one shows up in the meantime. They told me to keep it.
A few days later I got the original item (it had been shipped to a completely wrong address via USPS). Then a few weeks later I got the "new" one. So now I have two of them.
The item? A Tamiya Grasshopper kit.
On the other hand, I received a $12 box of wet wipes that came in a giant, nicely padded box. The product itself was in a sturdy box. $400 dollars worth of computer storage was shipped improperly, but Amazon made sure I got my box of wet wipes safe and sound!
More often than not, I receive small items in giant boxes. Amazon used to ship one order in one box, now they ship one order in many boxes.
I don't know how much waste Amazon generates with lazy packaging, but it must be a colossal amount.
Usually for items that will ship with external facing identifiable product information, they will give you the option (a checkbox) to have it packed inside an Amazon box...
For SIOC products, I believe there's always an option to include an Amazon box _around_ the original box, however it's optional because that second box is considered to be waste, as the product packaging is already supposed to be good enough for shipping purposes.
they often have notes, highlighting, and dogears -- perfect for our use-case
Wouldn't this be down to the individual seller?
Half the time on Amazon it's hard to even tell anything. As someone else said, books are REALLY bad. It's a gamble as to what you actually receive sometimes.
I usually buy them from Best Buy's online site which always seems to have the same price as amazon now
Like, if you order a huge item from amazon, it will come in 2 feet of normal recyclable cardboard. But if you order books? They send them in those ridiculous mailers.
More than half of the orders I've placed on eBay in the past year have been cancelled by eBay or PayPal because they detected fraud from the seller. I can't be bothered to keep wasting my time and money on a site that is hardly even a shadow of what it used to be.
Amazon suffers the same,but slightly different problems.
As such I've had no choice but to revert back to shopping in person, or in many cars simply skip out on purchasing things I could have readily found on eBay or Amazon five years ago for good prices without hassle. Somewhere eBay and Amazon have completely dropped the ball. I hope it effects their bottom line soon because the second hand stores near me are junk.