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CPOx t1_jdjh1vu wrote

I've posted this a couple times over the last year or so.

I work as an engineer in a factory where our products go in corrugated cardboard boxes. The corrugated cardboard market has seen substantial price increases over the last few years. Think about it ... all of a sudden in 2020, the entire world was buying everything online and getting it shipped in cardboard boxes. Cardboard manufacturers had a hard time keeping up with demand and really the prices haven't come back down since then.

You can see the steep increase in slope shortly after 2020 starts here:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PCU32221132221102

So, as an engineer in my company we are tasked basically daily to work on ideas to cut costs to our product. Reducing or eliminating the amount of cardboard that we use is an easy way to cut costs. I never peeled back the layers of my old HD650 box, but I imagine the "interior" of that fancy box was just some kind of dense paper product with some nice looking cosmetic material on the outside.

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