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Updated: Apr 15, 2021 84 Comments · by

Coffee Break: Self-Sealing Poly Shipping Bags

Coffee Break | · ·

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I was thinking about random purchases I’ve made lately, and something I’ve bought twice now is this type of shipping bag. (First purchase was several years ago, maybe as long ago as 2015.)

I use them all the time when I’m returning items bought online, if I haven’t managed to save the box or bag that something came in, or when the store annoyingly sends five small boxes for one order. I have two sizes of the bags — the pictured size is the smaller one, which fits about three pairs of jeans, and this size is huge. (If you’ve used thredUP, the latter is like their bags.)

These envelopes also come in handy if you’re traveling and want to mail dirty clothes home rather than bring them back in your luggage, if you’ve got space constraints.

They’re also great if you’re mailing a lot of clothes or other soft items for something like Poshmark or eBay! The smaller size is available at Amazon for $14.99 for a pack of 100, and the larger size is $14.74 for 50. Self-Sealing Poly Shipping Bags

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Workwear sales of note for 12.1.23

Our favorites are in bold!

Kid- and Family-Related Sales

  • BabyJogger – 25% off 3 items with code
  • Crate & Kids – Toy & gift event: up to 50% off everything; save 10% off full price items
  • J.Crew Crewcuts – 50% off everything; extra 30% off sale styles
  • Ergobaby – 40% off Omni Breeze Carrier, 25% off Evolve 3-in-1 bouncer, $100 off Metro+ Strollers
  • Graco – Up to 30% off car seats
  • Strolleria – 25% off Wonderfold wagons, and additional deals on dadada, Cybex, and Peg Perego
  • Walmart – Savings on Maxi-Cosi car seats, adventure wagons, rocker recliners, security cameras and more!

Some of our latest posts here at Corporette…

And some of our latest threadjacks here at Corporette (reader questions and commentary) — see more here!

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Kat Griffin is the founder, publisher, and editor-in-chief of Corporette. You can read more about her here.

Comments

  1. Anon

    I’m in the second round of a job interview – for this round, I need to write my own plan for my first 100 days on the [potential] job. The job is working from home and traveling across a region, being a liaison between local governments and the state. Any suggestions of how to tackle writing the plan?

    Also, I will get a chance to meet many potential future colleagues, and I’m supposed to have questions prepared to ask them. Any suggestions? I asked a lot of questions in my first interview about how much travel is expected and what challenges the person taking the position will face, but that was with the CEO and management, and this is more with equals.

    • Pompom

      Look up the book/resource The First 90 Days as a jumping off point. There are tons of resources, presentations, and form plans out there related to it. Might be a helpful framework that you can “fill in” tailored to this role. Good luck!

    • CHL

      For meeting future colleagues I would ask them a lot about their priorities and what they value in a partner/colleague. Many 90 day plans I see follow some variation of 1) meet people, build relationships, gather a lot of info, 2) Identify pain points/ares of focus, 3) action planning for future. Good luck!!

    • anon

      it would be very insightful to ask peers what they think the main challenges are. They might have a very different view on things than management. Also I like asking several people (if talking separately) the same stuff. What do you like about working here? What kind of person thrives in this company culture? How long have you worked here?

    • Anonymous

      I second The First 90 Days book. You don’t have to follow that plan afterward, but the plan from this book always looks great in the interview process.

  2. M

    I have another Q about traveling. DH and I are supposed to go to a work conference next week in another major E coast city. He now is worried about covid-19 and wants to not go, or drive there (would take a full day) and not go to all the events. Is this bananacrackers or AITA here?

      • anon

        I agree that I would not change travel plans to the East coast, but currently, I’m seeing 9% mortality in the statistics.

        • pugsnbourbon

          Interesting – where are you seeing 9%? The Johns Hopkins tracker is down, but the numbers I saw yesterday had a case fatality around 2.5% worldwide.

          • anon

            The problem with simply dividing cases over deaths is that the spread is ongoing (although it seems to be slowing down). Of the 80.000, there is only a stated outcome for 30.000 (either dead or recovered), the rest are active cases. So the majority of cases is undecided, and it skews the math considerably if you count all of them as if they were closed, recovered cases. If you only look at the closed cases, mortality is 9%. However, this is down from last week, when I think it was around 20%, which could mean that earlier on, only more severe cases were noticed and counted, whereas now everyone is super alert and gets tested the moment they have a fever, so now many lighter cases do show up in the statistics and bring down the mortality.
            Also, it’s my understanding that most of the deaths occur when there are other medical issues. But as long as open cases so greatly outweigh the closed cases, (cases/deaths) will give you a really unrealistic mortality rate.

          • pugsnbourbon

            Thanks for clarifying, anon at 4:40! I am not in public health/epi (obviously)but I find it interesting and try to keep up.

        • Anon

          Where are you seeing that? It’s currently ~79,000 cases and ~2,600 deaths. That’s 3%. Although in reality it’s probably significantly lower than that, because mild cases aren’t being diagnosed since people who don’t need medical attention just care for themselves at home, as with the flu.

          Also, something that I think is underappreciated is the point that the serious complication of coronavirus is viral pneumonia and lung infections hit smokers much harder than others. Since many people in China smoke, that may explain the high complication and death rate. It’s entirely possible this would just be a normal flu in non-smokers. Some reports suggest that it kills men at 20 times the rate it kills women, and smoking is one possible explanation for that (men apparently smoke at much higher rates than women in China).

    • Anon

      Bananacrackers. Wash your hands, don’t touch your face, rest well. If you’re really concerned, stay six feet back from people that appear visibly sick and don’t take public transport.

      • Vicky Austin

        Why is this such a battle with some men? It’s literally the one thing you can control, AND YET.

      • Anon

        And yet we’ve found TA!
        (Not the OP. OP, you’re good to go. Definitely NTA)

      • Anonymous

        Hey man, enough of us frequent that sub that we can use the terminology here, most of us know what it means.

    • Anon

      I suspect that one anxious person is responsible for a LOT of the coronavirus posts we’ve seen here lately. The language and all the scenarios are similar. Please try to relax.

      • Anon

        I live in the Midwest, hours from the nearest international airport, and know a lot of people who are freaking out about it. People just love to panic about stuff like this.

    • Anonymous

      Bananacrackers, definitely. There’ve been so few cases on the east coast and it’s been fairly well contained. I’d be slightly more worried about the west coast, but we’re traveling there in April, so I choose not to be worried about it right now. The only places I would cancel travel to right now would be China, and *maybe* South Korea, but that’s about it.

    • Ellen

      If I were you, I would be careful about the Corona Virus. Dad says it is only a matter of weeks before the USA gets effected by the virus. So many people travel, and a lot of people come here all the time from China and Asia, and many are asypmpmatic, meaning they look well and get sick later, and by then they’ve infected dozens of people. Dad encourages all people to get the normal flu virus, b/c it could help a bit. I think Dad is right. He says we should be OK if we just stay away from people and do not have close contact, so do not use the subways during rush hour, and wear a mask when out in traffic.

  3. Anon

    What’s your favorite source for inspiration when you’re just not feeling it? My usual go to’s are a good audiobook instead of my usual litany of podcasts, going for a walk, and taking a night off to cook something with my favorite playlist and a glass of wine. What do you do when you need to reset?

    • Vicky Austin

      A five-minute dance party in my office with the door closed has done wonders for me in the past. I also count “getting something different for lunch” and “going home from work a different way” in this box. Music helps me a lot too – doesn’t even have to be my favorite playlist, just something other than what I’ve been listening to lately.

  4. Anon

    I think it’s a better idea to save the packages that something comes in, at least for a week or so. If you’re going through more than one 100-quantity box of extra plastic bags just for returns, that sounds wasteful and like you aren’t saving ANY of your original packaging. However, I do like the idea of these for emergencies.

    • Anon

      Whether you save packaging or not, 50-100 returns from online ordering seems VERY excessive.

    • Cat

      +1. It is not that hard to hold onto the shipping box until you’ve tried something on! I hate spending money on stuff like that — like buying trash bags that you will literally throw away.

      To Anon above, I mean, 50-100 returns in a month might be excessive, but over a period of a few years? Returning let’s say 2 things per month gets you to 48 returns in 2 years…

      • Anonymous

        I actually hold onto my shipping materials for waaay longer than I need to! I sometimes tell myself “you’ve tried it on, washed it, and worn if five times already, you don’t need the packaging!” but what if I need to return something else?? Sometimes I’ll receive a big order that comes in a big box, and if I only need to return one thing, I’d like the option of simply putting it in a small bag to send it back, because then I can pop it in a mailbox in my neighborhood. A bigger box, for me, means making a trip to a post office with my big box, and that can be a chore – either a weekend errand, or something I have to haul to work on public transit to mail on my break – if I have a narrow return window, finding time to run this errand is stressful.

        I guess my point is, these aren’t always necessary or ideal for making returns, but they’re good to have on hand in case you ever do need one.

    • anon

      My reaction to this item was, “oh great, we’ve found away to make online shopping even worse for the environment.”

    • Ribena

      I tend to save the mailer packets even from orders where I don’t return anything, to then use for this use case.

      • anon

        Save the bags. Cut them at the top instead of tearing into them, it’s easy to tape it back up. Some retailers use special bags with 2 lines of adhesive, so if you open it where indicated, you can reseal it with the other adhesive strip.

    • Anonymous

      Great idea on the mailers. Things sometimes arrive in horribly grubby packaging, or in broken boxes. Plus, someone buys something off our eBay site every week and not everything fits in the USPS mailers.

    • Anonymous

      I think this post is totally tone deaf (not the reply, the original post about the packages) as we’ve been talking constantly about how many of us are trying to reduce the amount of plastic we’re using.

    • LaurenB

      +1. Doesn’t it just kind of scream “so disorganized that I have to buy stuff and return it”? I get the occasional return or exchange but to be constantly buying and returning things is just so chaotic and wasteful. Not to mention environmentally unsound.

    • Angela

      Yeah, this is so weird to me. Seriously, in the age of Amazon, people still feel the need to BUY shipping materials? I have more boxes and envelopes than I can fit into my recycle bin at this point. Why would I spend more money to buy my own?

      Also, mailing clothes home from a trip? What the what? How long are these trips/how big are these souvenirs?

      • anon

        I recently bought a beautiful vase from Venice (a city known for it’s glasswork). I buy original art on most vacations but it is usually the thing I ship home

      • Clementine

        I stayed here when I was 16 and it was the first experience with a high end hotel I had ever had! It was amazing for the location.

        (Note: this was a bucket list trip my mom had saved up for a decade for and some how the travel agent got an incredible deal on this room… I still can’t believe it’s an experience I got to have at that age and that trip stayed with me forever.)

        To sum up: travel with your kids.

    • Anonymous

      Paris hotel rooms are tiny and expensive. Each time I travel there step up a notch price wise from the trip before and I still have not found some where I would recommend.

    • Cat

      are you opposed to renting an apartment? Would 100% recommend a One Fine Stay, Airbnb, or other rental rather than an exorbitant tiny hotel room.

      • Equestrian Attorney

        Please be mindful of the devastating effect airbnb had on housing in Paris. Hotel rooms are small and expensive because spaces are small and expensive in Paris, and I get the temptation, but as a native it’s incredibly frustrating to see homes being rented as airbnbs while regular people are pushed further and further out of the city and it’s really draining for neighborhood life (my parents are going crazy with the Airbnb’s in their building). Paris had laws restricting airbnb already, so please ensure that your airbnb is compliant (ie, either registered as a tourism rental or someone’s actual home which they rent out for less than 120 days a week).

        • Anon

          This is destroying the rental/housing market in so many cities. It’s so frustrating.

        • anon

          Do you find that Paris’s laws are sufficient for keeping up with the problems caused by AirBnB? I just read this article from WiredUK – “I stumbled across a huge Airbnb scam that’s taking over London” (link in my reply in hopes of avoiding moderation) and it seems like London’s regulations are failing miserably.

          • Equestrian Attorney

            No, they’re really not sufficient and they are not very consistently enforced. A management company bought a number of units in my parents’ building and people have loud parties, leave trash in the hall, don’t shut the front door leading to robberies, etc. It’s really made me rethink airbnb and I never use it in cities anymore.

      • Anon

        This probably makes me a hypocrite but here goes – I’ll rent an apartment if we have a larger group so we can all be together, but I try to avoid it for just the two of us.

    • LSC

      Hotel Europe Saint Severin. It’s nothing over the top fancy, but still charming and located in the very walkable Latin Quarter.

    • BabyAssociate

      Is it your first time in Paris? If not, I loved the Renaissance Paris Republique, but I do think it’s better situated for a second or third time visitor.

    • Anonymous

      I wish I knew the name of the place I stayed in back in June 2017, it was great, and so close to Notre Dame! I definitely recommend the Latin Quarter.

      The main thing you may want to consider is air conditioning. Most hotels in Paris either don’t have it or don’t have very good air conditioning because historically it’s not necessary, Europe doesn’t get as hot as parts of the US, but lately they’ve been experiencing some crazy heatwaves in the summer. If trying to sleep in 90+ degree weather with nothing but a weak fan sounds miserable to you, I recommend find a place with air conditioning if you can. Or maybe you have a high heat tolerance and you’re used to it, in which case, disregard this paragraph. I’m weak.

    • Anon

      Yeah, but I guess the purpose of this blog is to promote consumerism, so it tracks.

  7. Salmon mom

    What’s your standard on wearing clothing and donating? I have a bunch of stuff that’s perfectly good but I haven’t worn it in over a year. Would you donate at this point? It’s stuff I can’t see myself wearing in the near future but I suppose I could one day? I feel like I just need someone to give me permission to get rid of a bunch of clothing I haven’t used in over a year.

    • Ribena

      If I haven’t worn it in a year, AND I can’t foresee wearing it in the next six months, AND I could afford to replace it if I did need it, I try to donate it. (Eg I no longer need to dress smartly every day and I have a fair few formal dresses kicking around still – need to declutter most of them).

      • Angela

        Your comment about formal dresses also got me thinking — services like Rent the Runway have also cut way down on the need to hold onto “once a year” type special occasion dresses. Rather than take up closet space, you can just rent what you need and be done with it after one night. And let’s be honest, most of the time for a big event like a sibling’s wedding or office Christmas party, you want to buy something new and fresh anyway.

    • LaurenB

      Donate it. Let someone else buy/use/wear it. That’s how you get to “not wasteful.” What’s wasteful is having it sit in your closet unused.

    • Anonymous

      Donate. I’ve donated a lot of stuff in the past year using the “haven’t worn it in a year” rule. It’s so nice to have a closet in which I can actually find things, because it’s not overstuffed. I felt bad realizing that I had bought so many things I had not used, but I am proud to have resolved that from that point on, I will only buy clothing/shoes/purses if I love them, not because the item is a “good deal”, and I have stuck to it.

    • Angela

      My standard is (1) if I haven’t worn it in a year or so and (2) could I easily/relatively cheaply replace it if an occasion came up where I wish I had that exact item? So, uncomfortable fourth-round blazer that I never reach for? Donate, because if I really needed four blazers between dry cleaner visits (vanishingly unlikely), I could get another one for $100.

    • Anon

      I’ve taken to selling clothing I haven’t worn over 2 years on Poshmark (would have donated, so mostly for a very low price), because I’ve gone back to school and could definitely use the extra $500 that my 30 extra pants, dresses, and skirts will bring in. I will donate whatever I haven’t sold at the end of the semester.

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