#2 Small Box Of Bolts. It Had Just As Much Paper On Top As Well. They Didn't Budge An Inch Though
Back in the day, receiving a package was a rare and exciting occurrence. If your parents shipped you a present from across the country, it might be the highlight of your month. And there’s a good chance that you had to wait for a month for it to arrive in the first place.
Today, however, sending and receiving packages is a normal part of many people’s daily lives. If you live in a country with Amazon Prime, you can even receive orders within 24 hours of placing them. But as you’ll see from this list, the art of packing and shipping an item still hasn’t been perfected yet.
#5 A Single Car Freshener. This Was Part Of A 9 Piece Order, They Just Sent It In It's Own Separate Box
According to Capital One Shopping, the average American receives 66 package deliveries every year. And a typical household in the United States receives 167 packages annually. These numbers are only expected to rise, with experts projecting that by 2029, global package deliveries will exceed 500 billion.
Americans do receive packages at a particularly high rate, 52.4% higher than the global average, to be exact. But these deliveries are primarily small purchases, as the average cost per package was only $9.08 in 2024. Meanwhile, globally, the average person received 42 packages in 2022. And the average cost per package worldwide was only $3.01 that year.
#7 This Was My Box Of Silverware. I Thought It Felt A Little Bottom-Heavy -- It's Because The Whole Upper Section Was Empty
Unsurprisingly, a huge portion of the packages shipped each year come from online retailers. Ordering a product that will show up on your doorstep is significantly simpler than having to drive to the mall and pick something out. But speed isn’t every customer’s priority, as 46% of online shoppers say they’ve opted for a longer shipping option to cut costs. Customers are also twice as likely to value free shipping over fast shipping.
In the United States, a whopping 92.1% of all domestic shipments are handled by the US Postal Service (USPS), Amazon Logistics, UPS, and FedEx. These four main carriers bring in over 96% of market revenue. The USPS still handles the majority of shipments, but the percentage that they take on has been declining for a long time. In fact, between 2017 and 2024, the USPS’s share of domestic package volume shrank by over 28%.
If you have a great experience ordering something online, you’re likely to do it again. But if something arrives smashed, broken, and dripping wet, you might swear off online ordering forever. Companies seem to have an incredibly difficult time finding the middle ground between excessive packaging and shoving something into a box that’s clearly far too small. But according to the BBC, they often opt for the former, just to be safe.
#18 Had To Collect A Parcel From The Post Office As It Was Too Large For My Postbox
Barry Kronhaus, director of sales and marketing at Sun Packaging Technologies, told the BBC that workers often choose excessively large boxes for items simply because they’re in a rush. If there are two options in front of them, one that’s too small and one that’s far too big, they’re simply going to pick the larger box and move on. Especially when they’re working for a massive corporation that won’t lose any money by giving out gigantic boxes from time to time.
