I worked most of my career at Kodak at their main warehouse on Lexington Avenue. It was a huge building with over 2 million square feet of space. There was all kinds of products in the warehouse from photo chemicals, all kinds of film, dental products, cameras, etc.

This story is about camera bags. Kodak had been selling camera bags for decades. It was an accessory that many customers wanted. It was good for Kodak as they didn’t cost much and there was good profit in selling them. One year, I don’t remember the exact year but somewhere about the year 2000, Kodak had many sizes of camera bags they were stocking in our warehouse. A buyer ordered a few thousand of one bag. It was fairly large, about 6 x 6 x 3 inches, as I remember, made in China. We knew there was a problem when the bags started showing up in many trailers at the receiving dock. The buyer had accidentally added an extra zero on the order. He was going to get 10 times his original order.

Trailers kept coming… Very quickly all the rack space in our giant warehouse filled up. Pallets of the bags started filling any aisle space available. Before the trailers stopped we even had to send hundreds of pallets to the building next to us. There ended up being enough of this camera bag to last 10 years.

At that time Kodak had their own internet store. So in order to get rid of all the bags, that Christmas if you bought any digital camera from the Kodak online store you got a free camera bag.

After Christmas there still were some of those camera bags leftover but it was a much more manageable quantity.

Somehow that buyer managed to keep his job. His mistake ended up giving thousands of people a free gift that Christmas.