Plaidophile

So as we all know, Amazon provides free shipping for orders over $25. They also have many items which are just barely below $25, such as the Star Wars Trilogy ($24.99), which does not qualify for Super Saver.

They also have many cheap items, such as Charles Leonard Inc. Ruler, 0.06 Inch Increments, 77556) ($0.29) which can be used to push an order past the $25 threshold in order to get free shipping.

Sometimes these items are backordered, and in order to provide items more quickly, Amazon will split an order and eat the shipping cost (which is usually around $3.90 per shipment).

Today I received a rather large box which contained the following:

• A cheap 10-gram wooden ruler
• Plastic packing bags
• A receipt for a $0.29 ruler + $3.90 shipping - $3.90 super saver discount

Suggested alternative to Amazon (which I can now post publicly seeing as how I don't work there anymore): For orders which are $24 or up, offer super saver shipping as an option where the discount simply brings the total price down to $25. I'm sure people would rather pay $1 for shipping than waste natural resources and peoples' time just to save some money.

(The somewhat-ironic thing is that they ended up shipping the Star Wars DVDs with another order anyway. I suppose that their total cost and impact was the same, though, since if it hadn't been for that other order they probably wouldn't have split the order. Still, seems silly.)