Imagine opening your door for an Amazon delivery and seeing your order of foot odor pads without a box – just as your nosy neighbor walks by.
That scenario may play out sooner than you think as Amazon begins testing box-less deliveries in 2023.
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The retail delivery behemoth says it will ramp up efforts to increasingly shed those ubiquitous brown box packages and prod its sellers to ramp up the use of so-called “ship in container” boxes, The Wall Street Journal reported.
“The recognition by a number of senior leaders was just that this is becoming more and more important,” Amazon packaging czar Pat Lindner told The Journal. “There’s a significant need for our company to take the next step in innovation around packaging.”
Amazon believes it has two good reasons to forego its own packaging boxes – doing so will help curb operating costs and the move will also help the environment.
All told Amazon ships about 608 million packages annually, or about 1.6 million packages on a daily basis, according to data from Sanford C. Bernstein. By any measure, that’s a ton of cardboard and Amazon is realizing the future is box-less for product deliveries.
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Consumers can play a role in no-box deliveries, too.
Currently, 11% of all Amazon deliveries hit doorsteps with no external boxes. The company offers a checkout choice of adding external packaging or going without.
Going forward, Amazon prefers to you choose the latter. What’s more, company executives believe you’ll like it that way.
“There’s a lot of stuff that we can do on the packaging design for things you never would have expected were even possible,” Lindner told The Journal, citing wine glasses as an example.
With fewer boxes in its delivery future, Amazon hopes customers will raise their own box-less glasses and drink to that.
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