Fewer Fields Friday

The mistake

Removing a required field from a form doesn't remove the need for its value — it just moves the choice from the user to whatever default the code picks. Here the country select is dropped and the submitted value falls back to the first option in the list, which is the alphabetically first country rather than a deliberate default. Every order that week silently ships with that value, and because nothing errors out there's no signal that the data is wrong until the parcels move.