I ordered a couple small buckets of bricks from shop.lego.com earlier this week and was surprised when the postal carrier had to make a special trip to his car to get the package. At 27″ wide, it was difficult to carry through the front door lengthwise.
This box was perhaps not the perfect size for my order:
For reference, those buckets are about 11 inches long. They could have fit 6 or 7 of them in this box.
Everything was in good shape – LEGO bricks are light and durable, of course – but I have another slight problem with LEGO’s shipping. They use the “Smartpost” method, where they use FedEx to ship the package to the local USPS post office, which then delivers the package to the final destination. (UPS has a similar service available)
The first annoying thing about Smartpost is that it usually adds at least one day to the shipping time because the local post office has to sort it.
The second annoying thing is that the tracking systems for FedEx and USPS are not integrated and when your package gets handed off from one service to the next, it goes into a kind of twilight zone where you have no idea when it will actually arrive. For almost two full days my package showed “in transit” between two large US cities that are just hours apart. It didn’t really take two days – that’s just how long it took from the time FedEx delivered it to USPS until USPS scanned it.
In the meantime, tracking the package on FedEx gave a delivery date of Monday 1/23. Tracking it with USPS gave no information at all until the package was already at my local PO and out for delivery – on Saturday, 1/21.
So a happy ending, I guess. I got my order sooner than FedEx said I would, and I now have a sturdy packing box that can hold the entire contents of a standard bedroom closet.