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I have to wonder at Home Depot’s logic for shipping things.

I had an order I placed online, and it was under their $45 threshold for free shipping, so I added a couple of small items that I was planning on getting eventually anyway. So the total was just over $45, and it was 5 items.

Guess what they did – they put the 5 items into 4 different shipments.

I would have expected that free shipping is made profitable by running things together – bundle a bunch of packages together for economies of scale and reducing overhead.

But not for this order. They made it about as inefficient as possible, at least from my view.

And no, it’s not like they ended up arriving together. The delivery guy came to our house 4 separate times for these 4 packages for the single order I placed. It’s slightly annoying to me, it’s probably more annoying to the delivery guy, because he drove to our house 3 days in a row to deliver a fairly small package each time.

I’d have been happier if everything arrived at once. In fact, I’ve noticed that Amazon gives me that option sometimes – deliver in as few packages as possible. That’s an option I like.

My guess is that Home Depot has focused on using the efficiencies on their side, rather than the customer’s side. Maybe they shipped each items from the closest warehouse that stocks that item, and in my case that happened to be 4 different warehouse that worked out to 4 different delivery dates to me.