Hello guys.
So today I received this box and this is not an Amazon box, it's actually from Mouser. And it's very light and I'm wondering what does it have inside? So I open it and I find in it this envelope and I'm like, whoa, this is a static protection envelope. This is really cool. So I open this one and what I get is a box and I'm like, wow, what's in there? And I open this one and what I'm getting is this type of packaging. So it's still packaging. And so if you see the actual product, it's this one and it comes in this packaging and I measure it and I do the calculations and you can fit 87,000 of those pieces in here. Many people are angry at Amazon because they get a small thing in a big box, but it's nothing like 87,000 times smaller. But Mouser is a totally different type of company,
But we have to have it this big to have everything an engineer might need. If they have a hundred parts or fifty parts, we want to get it to them in one box the next day.
So what they do is they bring small semiconductor components to people who want to create electronic circuits. That's a fairly small market. So the overall damage they cause, I think it's minor. But on the other hand, this package and post cost me about $7. That's pretty annoying because many times I want to order three or five dollars worth of things from Mouser and then having to pay $7, that's annoying. And also many times as soon as you have put the order, you cannot add to that order later. So you have to pay another seven if you forgot to buy a little connector that you also need. And I do pay for all this packaging. So let's see what value it adds. So this is a chip and it's very small and quite sensitive but not that much, right? And it's also very sensitive to electrostatic discharge.
So you get this chip in this reel kind of case and although it is not protecting from electrostatic discharge, at very least you cannot touch directly the pins. So it helps a little bit. Now when Mouser puts this in, this packaging, as you can see this is some type of foam and it says here, attention static sensitive devices. So this is all in order to protect those chips when you carry them. And maybe, maybe this is a bit too much, I don't know, for for two chips this might be too much. And then this goes to this case, which is moisture sensitive devices. And indeed it has those to protect from moisture, which is a little bit of an overkill. And also this one to testify that it hasn't been exposed to lots of moisture, but basically this is also antistatic kind of bag.
So we have double antistatic protection, which might be too much. And so when I put all those things one inside the other, I have already an envelope that seems pretty safe to me. So putting it also in this box, yeah, I think this box probably all it does is a little bit of privacy. So not everybody can see that you buy this type of electronic, but I don't know if many people need that. If it was just this envelope and this envelope was a white envelope and nobody could see what's inside, I would be pretty happy with this packaging too. And I guess this would be much cheaper, much less to dispose and also lower load for the post office. All this extra packaging does two things. One is to minimize the likelihood that I will waste a day or two because the component is damaged.
And the second thing it does is that it minimizes the probability I will return something. The fact is though, that I always order multiple components because I know that I damaged those components myself. And in case of a return, I really cannot do the calculation. I think it depends on the component, how much cost would it be for Mouser to receive a return of a damaged component. So my conclusion is that this is indeed great packaging. But I might not need it to be that great. So all I would like is to be able to pay $1 and I would probably order smaller quantities, but more often and you know, if they get lost or if they get damaged, okay, I don't care a lot. That should be my default. But if there is a critical or expensive component or a tight deadline, I would have the option to pay those $7 and get this fantastic packaging that ensures that my component will arrive in a very good condition. Of course, in the grand scheme of things, all those things don't matter a lot. If Mouser was Amazon and was shipping billions of packets, I would certainly want to see more options. Because packaging is a pain in the a$$ both to receive and to post and to transfer and also to dispose. I really hate it when I have to dispose all those boxes in the recycling day.
Thanks for watching.
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