Amazon loses on shipping
I ordered a book on Amazon the other day that cost $24.95. That price put it just $0.05 away from qualifying for free shipping. Rather than cough up the $7 in shipping costs, I searched around for something cheap that would put me over the threshold and since I know I have some electrical work to do on my car, I picked up some wire shrink wrap for $.18. It worked out and I saved some money on shipping.
Then things got weird (and expensive for Amazon).
A day or two after placing the order, I got an email from Amazon saying they had divided my order into two shipments. The irony made me laugh: I had only ordered the cheap tubing to save on shipping for the book, and now they were doubling their costs to get me my tubing that costs less than a quarter.
When the tubing package came in, I realized just how much Amazon lost on the deal.
Instead of shipping it in a 3"x4" bubble envelope like I expected, this tiny bit of tubing (flexible, and about the thickness of a pencil) came in a 4′ plastic tube that was then in a super reinforced cardboard mailer. The shipping label didn’t have a price on it, but it did list the weight at 6 pounds.
Not only did Amazon lose money on shipping the original book, but they had to have thrown at least $10 down the drain to ship me my 20-cent tubing (which, as it turns out, is too narrow and I won’t even use it).
I am not complaining, but the inefficiency certainly made me chuckle.