Walmart Order: Multiple Shipments and One Nearly Empty Box

We ordered some household items from Walmart last week. The order shipped quickly and we were impressed to see a big box at our house two days ago. However, this only had some of the items that we had ordered in it. While this box was packed almost full, with little wasted space, the box that arrived yesterday, was full of wasted space.

I opened the box expecting to see several more items from our Walmart order, given the size of the box.

The box looked big as I was opening it.

When I pulled back the plastic bubble wrap, there were only two items. The box was pretty much completely empty. Why were these two items sent in such a big box?

This doesn't look very full.

Seriously?! Only two items in this huge box?

I still can't believe that this was it in the box.

And now we’re waiting for at least one more box to receive the rest of our Walmart order. While I appreciate that Walmart tries to get items to customers as soon as they can, surely sending almost empty boxes with only an item or two in them while there are a bunch of outstanding items is ridiculous. It’s definitely wasteful.

When one considers how big Walmart is and how much it must ship, all of this Walmart overpackaging will certainly add up to a ton of waste. While the cardboard can be recycled (and plastic is being recycled more now), it takes a lot of resources to produce it and it’s unlikely to be reused. Instead, it will end up in the recycling pile with more resources required to recycle it. Walmart should set an example and try to decrease the amount of waste it produces in shipping (past orders from Walmart have been less wastefully packaged, so I hope that this is just a one-off). Overpackaging from Walmart and other big companies produces a world of waste.

Another big wasted box.

So much waste leftover from such a small partial shipment.