Dear Crutchfield
July 22, 2009 at 10:00 pm | 3 Comments »
I bought a simple ground loop isolator from you to get rid of an annoying hum that comes from the new DC adaptor required by the latest iPhones and iPods. It’s nice because yours has mini-jack connectors on each. Just plug it in. And it was only $18. The $7 shipping charge seemed annoying but even with it you had the best price.
The gadget arrived yesterday and it works great. I’m a happy camper.
Except why did you ship it in such a ridiculously large box? I mean take a good look at that picture. The thing is solid state electronics and presumably tough enough to survive the bumps and jostles that come from life in a car. Why in the world does it need a shipping carton 100 times its volume? And you filled it with those damn styrofoam peanuts. Now I’ve got to find a way to get ride of them. Thanks.
Maybe if you used more efficient packaging, you wouldn’t have to have a 40 percent markup for shipping. Just a thought.
Maybe the box is a gift for Sydney.
Thank you for your order and for voicing your concern about our shipping boxes. The box your item came in is the smallest we keep on hand in our distribution center. These boxes cost us considerably less than a padded envelope, and the weight difference is negligible.
We make our own shipping peanuts from starch. You can dissolve them in water or put them in your compost heap.
Before we made the switch to starch peanuts, we used between about 150 trailer loads of polystyrene peanuts annually. That’s over half a million cubic feet of plastic that won’t be dumped into landfills anymore. One trailer load of the starch pellets used to make our peanuts is the equivalent of 23 trailer loads of polystyrene peanuts. That means we spare the atmosphere a bit of diesel exhaust, too. You can read more here: http://www.crutchfield.com/mediarelations/20080311-peanuts.html.
Good info. Thanks for the comment.
Though I wish I’d realized that the peanuts were compostable. I put them in the regular trash. I did look through the included materials to see if I could find info on their recyclability. You might consider adding that to the boxes or making it more prominent if I overlooked it.