The free box slows the line

Free gift wrap on every order. A tick box at checkout, a line across the banner, built in an afternoon and live by the weekend.

It was priced at the paper and the ribbon, which on a spreadsheet is defensible. A few pence of material against a basket worth thirty times as much. The margin barely moves. An offer that cheap approves itself in a corridor.

Then it reaches the bench.

An ordinary parcel is a picked item, a bag or a carton, a label, a scan. Under a minute on a good day. A wrapped parcel is a different job. The paper is cut to the item rather than to the box, folded, taped, the note printed and read back against the order, then the whole thing protected by an outer carton so the wrap survives the van. Two minutes if the bench has done it before. Four when the tape runs out and somebody goes looking for more.

In an ordinary week that gap is invisible. Everything leaves the same day either way.

This is not an ordinary week. The holiday is expected at the end of it, depending on the sighting, the courier has one last collection before the country stops, and every parcel in the building is racing the same cut-off. The bench has a fixed number of hands and a fixed number of hours, and the queue behind it is the longest it gets.

So the free wrap does not come out of the margin. It comes out of throughput, in the hour of the year when throughput is the entire promise. The orders on the wrong side of the cut-off arrive after the holiday, to somebody who bought a gift and received a parcel.

That cost turns up in the returns, in the inbox, in the review, in what the cohort does next year. It never turns up on the line where the box was priced.

Marketing priced the free thing. The person at the bench paid for it.