Yesterday I received a very cordial e-mail from Mr. Henry Posner at B&H informing me that they are discontinuing the dreaded plastic bags and returning to foam peanuts to pack their shipments. Neat!
Yesterday I received a very cordial e-mail from Mr. Henry Posner at B&H informing me that they are discontinuing the dreaded plastic bags and returning to foam peanuts to pack their shipments. Neat!
Heh. I've always thought the plastic bags were a better idea than foam peanuts. Seemed to do the job fine and you could recycle them to boot. And foam peanuts are just an instantaneous mess. Ah well - to each his own (packing material).
While I wholeheartedly agree that peanuts create a royal mess, I gather you have not received a carton from B&H lately. The last three cartons we got were not merely dented. They were absolutely squashed, with the paper tape burst in both directions. UPS must be doing airdrops these days. Without parachutes.
The plastic bags were a vast improvement, IMO. Peanuts are the curse that I have to collect (mostly off the floor) and store until I can drag my butt to local shipping place for reuse. I hate the damned things.
My cats want to play with/try to eat the peanuts so I have to shoo them away before dumping the peanuts into the trash. Most of the stuff I've been getting from there has been in peanuts anyway. I don't recall seeing the plastic bags very often. I wonder if they are going to use the peanuts that can be dissolved in water? That would be nice.
While I rather liked the recyclability of the air-pillow strips, they obviously don't provide sufficient internal support for the packages to survive the gorillas at UPS. Peanuts are a pain, but at least the goods arrive undamaged . . . most of the time. In San Jose, at least, the municipal recycling program accepts peanuts if placed in plastic bags. So, if your's doesn't, you might want to lobby them for better service. Or, just take them back to your local "Brown Store" for re-use.
Personally, I'm saving all of mine for a gallery showing. Yep, it's going to be a "peanut gallery". ;-)
Last week, when the UPS delivery guy rang my dorbell and handed me the box containing my shipment of Ilford film and chemicals from B&H, I asked if he was ashamed of the condition of the packing box. It was absolutely demolished. However, thanks to the air bags inside, the film boxes and chemical bottles were not damaged at all.
The UPS delivery guy pointed out that the boxes were made of a corrigated cardboard material that was much thinner and weaker than UPS standards. That type of material won't stand up to the normal stacking and handling as it passes through the UPS distribution centers and loaded onto the delivery trucks.
Using plastic peanuts, instead of air bags, probably won't solve B&H's problem. We will be seeing UPS trucks heading down the road with a stream of plastic peanuts streaming out behind, as those flimsy boxes continue to collapse under the load.
I have to agree with the UPS guy and Eugene. A few years ago B&H switched to a much lighter gauge cardboard, as a result the boxes collapse. I have had to return several damaged boxes of paper. It seems that saving a few cents on cardboard was a bad decision for B&H. If they gave me an option of better packaging for a dollar more per shipment, I would sign for it.
I haven't had much problem with damaged boxes, but I mostly just order things like two bricks of film and a lens hood at one time or something like that. Maybe the smaller boxes are a little tougher than the bigger ones. I order from them every couple of months and have never had a problem with a damaged shipment or anything like that.
i haven't had any problems lately with shipments from b&h. while the peanuts go all over the place, and the pillows just sit there - i just dump all that packing material into a big bag/box and re-use it whenever i need to ship something to someone. i kind of like the peanuts i have to say, it is more fun to have to dig through a bunch of static-charged junk before i can find my stuff
its too bad they don't use the "earth friendly" ones that taste like stale capt'n crunch. that stuff isn't bad when the cupboards are bare and they are the only thing left to eat. too bad they aren't "atkin's friendly"
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