Life in the Ecommerce Cardboard Box Age

[mandy]

When you're buying books or CDs at 3 a.m., you may exult that you're living in the digital age. But a couple of days later, after those books or CDs arrive, you may have a different thought: Gee, I live in the cardboard age.

If shopping from home, low prices and new marketplaces are the fruits of the digital age, corrugated cardboard boxes are the orange peels -- the outer skin of e-commerce, piling up until it's time to take the lot to the curb. Last week, come recycling night, I pawed through a week's worth of flattened boxes, and every one of them was left over from an Internet transaction. There was Amazon's smiley-face arrow (trio of books); a trio of blank boxes (baseball cap from an Amazon third-party vendor, new grill racks from an Internet company); a Priority Mail box (eBay purchase) and three boxes from online grocer FreshDirect, with their assorted internal cardboard buffers and spacers...

full article: http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB1...in_tff_top