Was Packing Material Necessary?

Dear Petsmart: Was it really necessary to package the litter I ordered in boxes with packing material?

My wife has our car out of town right now and I decided I needed some more cat litter. We have four cats, so we can go through quite a bit of litter. The bags we buy are forty pounds each, and I wanted three. Trying to get these without having them shipped was going to be problematic.

So, I ordered online. Found a sale so even with shipping it was only a few dollars per bag more than normal. That was cool. We usually go to Petco, but they didn’t ship big bags of litter. Petsmart did. I figured they’d use UPS as opposed to the post office, which was good. Forty pound bags of litter wouldn’t fit in the boxes at our mailbox station and I probably would have been told to come pick them up at the post office. I would have been no better off than getting it from the store myself. UPS would drop off on our porch.

I didn’t think anyone would steal three forty pound sacks of litter.

So this was all there when I got home. Each bag was individually boxed. Eached was packed with a bunch of packing paper.

Cat litter is not particularly fragile, just in case you didn’t know.

It seemed silly, and wasteful, but maybe there was at least some reason. I suppose they had to box it so that the little bags didn’t get cut open in shipment. Also made it easier to stack in a truck, I suppose. I also suppose they couldn’t have the bags moving around in the boxes, and it would have been too heavy to put multiple bags in a single box.

All in all it probably wasn’t that weird…but it seemed odd when I first opened it.