If good things come in small packages, then surely something quite bad had to be inside the gigantic box on my doorstep.

Turned out it was just a $40 foam roller I'd bought on Amazon a few days earlier, on the advice of my physio who is trying to solve a stubborn niggle in my neck.

On the one hand, you had to give credit to Amazon.

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Customised rainbow-themed tape proudly sealed the box, in a sweet nod to the Mardi Gras parade which had lit up Sydney just two days earlier.

Nice touch, Jeff Bezos.

But a cavernous box dwarfed the 90cm-long, 15cm-diameter foam roller inside.

It was so vast and empty in there, it could have echoed.

Shouldn't the online behemoth, which sends out billions of packages every year and has an eye-popping market cap of $1.4 trillion, be doing better?

In the newsroom the next day, colleagues swapped war stories of silly-sized boxes carrying objects which humbly occupy a fraction of the space.

And it wasn't just Amazon.

Cosmetic companies, sending out gels, mascaras and other little beauty products in oversized boxes, seemed to be a repeat offender.

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