YOU STILL REMEMBER?
When holiday season arrives it is pretty common to see people everywhere checking their Taobao, JD or Amazon apps. Presents for your family, friends, colleagues, pets or EVEN for yourself. Oh yes, that beautiful moment of the year is here and you can already feel the excitement of emptying your virtual shopping cart.
“Hey, wait… wasn’t it only a few weeks ago that I was feeling this exact same excitement? Oh yeah, it was the 12.12 shopping festival! I got such great deals that day and I love those extra little (completely necessary) presents they send me sometimes.”
Now we want to ask you: can you remember all the products you enthusiastically purchased on 12.12?
Let’s go back in time a tiny bit more. You have 10 seconds to name every single product you purchased on 11.11 (“Single’s Day”).
10…
9…
8…
Was it hard to do? Did you need more time? And what’s even more important: were all those products you bought completely necessary?
We believe they were, of course, that fancy phone case you got really changed your life and those delicious Korean instant noodles couldn’t wait to be ordered.
Do you want to go back even a bit further? I dare you to mention anything you bought on 11.11 last year. Could you even name one single product?
We are not saying that buying those products was a terrible idea: economy needs to keep moving and you have probably enjoyed (to a greater or lesser extent) most of them and what the h*ll, I work, I do whatever I want with my money!
But now that you have realized you might had forgotten some of the things you thought essential and indispensable for your happiness… we invite you to look at this group of photos and take some time to think about the amount of energy, time, and resources wasted in this seemingly harmless process of delivering to products to your door step.
Is there any winner in this picture? Any company does better packaging than others? Well, not really. We are not here to talk about which one of these shops does a better job. But we want you to think about the full process that happens from the moment you order something online until the moment you have the product itself in your hands.
Oh, no, this is not (JUST) about the transportation from the shop to your door. Do you really believe that the same company that manufactures a cool design wallet would also have machines making customized plastic bags, little boxes with imprinted logos or company contact cards? It usually doesn’t work that way and that’s why we tend to ignore the extra miles and energy that we have to add up to the product. And why are they extra? Well, because including them or not doesn’t affect the product itself at all: this is not a car, where components might come from different factories but we are pretty much sure that both tires and seatbelts are quite necessary in the final product, right?
But yes, we also want to remind you about that time you thought you were too busy to go to a shop to buy a pencil or a notebook.