Richard writes: I think your comments are perfectly valid for the sorts of things that ship well with peanuts. There's even different types of peanuts that work well for different densities of items etc. But they do not work well for dense, heavy items with protrusions that have to be protected. Foam-in-place has a real advantage in keeping the object centered in the middle of the box - compressed peanuts work sometimes but foam-in-place works all the time. And some "handcrafting" with custom wooden or cardboard corner protectors, bubble wrap of appropriate type (some times are best for lightweight items and others will stand the abuse of heavy items) cleverly applied, or even newspaper/kraft paper PROPERLY used can do a remarkable job making sure that it's not the protrusions or corners that hit the edge of the box. It's not so much the peanuts I'm opposed to, they are valuable and sometimes appropriate tools. It's the attitude that throwing a 70 pound, very dense instrument with fragile protrusions into a cardboard box with peanuts around it is the best or only thing that can be done. What's astonishing is that 80% of the time when an instrument was damaged in transit, it was packaged by the "UPS store" or equivalent. You'd think that since they're charging for their services they might actually use UPS-recommended supplies and techniques, but they don't! Tim.