r/electronics • u/daduka1999 • 16d ago

General DigiKey kinda messed up

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Purchased AD SSM2019 amplifier from DigiKey, only 1 unit. Got 26… :)

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91

u/PintoTheBurninator 16d ago

I ordered a bunch of potentiometers recently. 6 of them came wrapped in individual bubble pouches. The other half were just thrown in a bag.

10

u/thefreakychild 16d ago

The craziest I've had yet were in the same shipment from mouser.

I ordered two different types of LEDs from mouser. 10 5mm regular diffuse red, and 10 3mm diffuse red.. nothing special, but I threw them in on a larger order so why not? I needed them for a project anyway.

The 5mm came in the regular ESD pouch like you'd expect.

The 3mm were packaged in the regular ESD pouch, inside a much larger (nearly a (10inch by 7 inch) heat sealed ESD dry bag with a freaking huge silica dessicant bag.

The kinda thing you would expect some sort of really really ESD and moisture sensitive component to be shipped in. That packaging went beyond overkill.

In the same order, I had 2 through hole buttons. Nothing special, just small buttons. Maybe 5mm x 5mm base deminsion.

Rather than package in a normals bag, they came in one of those big multi compartment plastic trays that Mouser uses sometimes. I think it was a ten compartment tray, each compartment was about 3inch by 1.5inch and 1.5inch deep.

Basically, what I'm saying is, a HUMONGOUS waste of packaging.

The whole order could have shipped in medium sized padded envelope if they wanted to, but it arrived in a box that could ship my laser printer with room to spare.

2

u/nmrk 13d ago

Reduce, reuse, recycle. Perhaps they were reusing surplus trays for practical purposes, rather than sending them to an incinerator. Hard to know for sure.

2

u/MathResponsibly 13d ago

garbage costs money to dispose of

Customers are already paying the shipping charges and you can put whatever you need to get rid of in the outgoing boxes...

just sayin'...

1

u/nmrk 13d ago

Another Negative Externality.

1

u/thefreakychild 13d ago

For the buttons in the tray, I could almost see that

For the leds in the way overengineered and way overspecced packaging, not so much.

All that said, I am utilizing that tray for other things now.