Recently, friend-of-the-site Alex S. sent me the following image:

Alex had recently purchased a desk, and it had arrived in this rather confusing box. He quipped that the whole thing deserved a David Attenborough voiceover

“Here we see how the simple computer desk has cleverly learned to disguise itself as a flat screen television, in order to ward off assault from delivery drivers”

Poking around the ol’ webernets, we were able to learn more about this strange packaging. Delightfully, it really is an attempt by Uplift Desk to prevent damage in transit. Over on Reddit, a company representative said:

Definitely not a joke…When we started putting this on our packaging, we saw a drastic decrease in damaged orders upon delivery. Of course it does still happen, but delivery drivers tend to handle things more gently if they think something as fragile as a flat screen TV is within the box. We’re doing what we can to lower damage rates, as we have no control over how drivers handle our product.

On the same post, another comment noted that the recipient’s FedEx guy had gotten into a debate with his colleagues about what was actually in the box. Some commenters expressed concern that this false imagery could lead to package theft (as well as very surprised and disappointed package thieves), but that appears to be a lesser concern. Given that this goofy packaging has been around for multiple years, it seems to be working as intended.

Update (December 12, 2023): Multiple readers wrote in about similar packaging used for VanMoof bicycle shipments. As one of those readers/likely Greek fella George A. noted, I actually covered that story back in 2016!