Last fall I picked up a rolling cat-box from CostCo. The brand was Omega Paw, who seem to be the only folks making this gadget. It's a nice design. It has a grating along one side so when you roll it over, the loose sand goes into a receptacle, and the clumps go into a removable drawer for easy disposal.

One of my electric "Litter Robot" units has been failing, so I decided to replace it with another rolling unit. It's arguably less overall effort than the automated units that need a serious cleaning once every six months or so.

Costco no longer has these. Apparently they sold out fast. PetSmart and my local stores never heard of rolling litter boxes. Luckily, Chewy has them, in a variety of sizes. But they only mail order.

The cat's new litter box got as far as Saline in two days, and managed the last twenty miles to my house in just another three days.

Both the shipping container and the packaging for the Omega Paws gadget were damaged, but the plastic litter box was intact. Which I fear speaks better about Omega Paw's packaging than it does Fed Ex's shipping practices.

After a few weeks of not buying stuff, I ended up with four or five shipments last week. Every single box was dented in shipping, be it UPS, FedEx or USPS.

Years ago, when I was working for SUNY Forestry, we isolated the Monarch Butterfly sex attractant for the first time. We needed to send our sample - roughly a milligram - to another researcher for more study. So my labmate took a length of styrofoam, hollowed it out and put the tube of sex pheremone in it. He ended up with a nice little package about ten inches long and two inches thick.

It was pretty much safe from anything that could happen in shipping, short of rolling over it with a tow motor.

Which the USPS promptly did. Someplace in Upstate New York there is a post office that probably still smells like a Monarch butterfly whorehouse.

After that, we packaged our samples in layers of boxes until there was something a foot or more in all dimensions holding a sample about the size of a grain of salt.

Just so it wouldn't fit under a tow motor.

Luckily, everyone who shipped me something knew this technique, and despite the shippers best efforts everything I ordered arrived intact.

There's a part of me that thinks if shippers didn't put so much effort into damaging boxes, there wouldn't be a need to triple-layer protect products. With fewer layers of armor, more packages would fit onto a truck and maybe we wouldn't be having supply-line issues.