Office Depot.... you fail.

[jason_incognito]

sold a couple things and didn't realize I was out of packing peanuts. I thought I still had a huge bag. 

No time to run to the small shop that sells reused peanuts cheap. I stopped at Office Depot. 

1.5 cubic foot bag.... $12.49 This was gonna be an expensive mistake.

the box I was shipping was 12 x 12 x16. The item was in it's own box 8 x 8 x 12.  Someone please explain to me how I not only used the whole bag, but that the bag didn't fill the box?

Oh, and they're the constarch ones that compress.

[sam9876]

I would never buy packing peanuts.

You could have scrunched up newspaper.

[flyerfandan999 · Accepted solution]

Do the arithmetic in cubic inches.

A cubic foot [12 x 12 x 12] = 1,728 cubic inches.

So 1.5 cubic feet = 2,592 cubic inches.

Your outer box [16 x 12 x12] holds 2,304 cubic inches.

Your inner box [12 x 8 x 8] took up 768 of those 2,304 cubic inches, leaving 1,536 cubic inches of empty space.

So every physicist on Earth wants to know how you couldn't fill 1,536 cubic inches of space with 2,592 cubic inches of material! 🙂

Possible explanations:

A. You were shipping a quantum singularity in the inner box.

B.  Those are some very squishy packing peanuts.

C.  Office Depot is fudging big-time on how much packing peanuts are in their "1.5 cu ft" bag o' peanuts.

D.  A pink foam elephant ate a lot of the peanuts while you weren't looking.

[a_c_green]

---

@flyerfandan999 wrote:

Do the arithmetic in cubic inches.

A cubic foot [12 x 12 x 12] = 1,728 cubic inches.

So 1.5 cubic feet = 2,592 cubic inches.

Your outer box [16 x 12 x12] holds 2,304 cubic inches.

Your inner box [12 x 8 x 8] took up 768 of those 2,304 cubic inches, leaving 1,536 cubic inches of empty space.

So every physicist on Earth wants to know how you couldn't fill 1,536 cubic inches of space with 2,592 cubic inches of material! 🙂

Possible explanations:

A. You were shipping a quantum singularity in the inner box.

B.  Those are some very squishy packing peanuts.

C.  Office Depot is fudging big-time on how much packing peanuts are in their "1.5 cu ft" bag o' peanuts.

D.  A pink foam elephant ate a lot of the peanuts while you weren't looking. 

---

The correct answer is "D"... although it's more likely mice... 

The photo below shows what my spare (unopened) bag of Office Depot peanuts looked like after spending some time in my basement. The "plant based" peanuts are apparently quite tasty (no, I haven't tried them), and mice spending the winter in our basement had a convenient food supply. A close look will show two neat round holes chewed through the bag on the right side, apparently one Entrance and one Exit for quick service, along with a small quantity of... ah... signs that mice had been in the bag, sprinkled across the bottom. No, we did not use up the remainder for shipping.

(P.S. No, I have no idea why the stupid interface here insists on displaying a Portrait photo in Landscape form. Believe me, I've tried everything I could think of to get the silly thing rotated to vertical, without success. Sorry.)

[thallidguy]

Yikes. Mice will go after stuff even if it's not edible/biodegradable. I left the TV remote on the floor by the couch one night and woke to find two of the buttons had been gnawed off.

But yeah, I'm not seeing a quantum singularity in the OP's items sold, so I'd have to go with D as well.

[jason_incognito]

It seems I paid an awful lot for air.

[hafoster]

[cargo11]

Geesh.....I go to U-Haul in my area - a bag of peanuts is/was $4.88.

[duchess-at-speakeasy]

The 1.5 cf bag was probably "loose fill," which is before any compression. Just remember that the optimum volume of packing chips is 130% of the box volume, regardless of any other contents. And, yes, I would have substituted crumpled paper, bubble wrap, foam chunks or any other suitable filler. I also would have used a smaller outer box unless the contents are exceptionally fragile and demand minimum buffering of 2 inches on all 6 sides. ~~C~~