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The Magic of Pallets
HughPickens.com writes Jacob Hodes writes in Cabinet Magazine that there are approximately two billion wooden shipping pallets in the holds of tractor-trailers in the United States transporting Honey Nut Cheerios and oysters and penicillin and just about any other product you can think of. According to Hodes the magic of pallets is the magic of abstraction. "Take any object you like, pile it onto a pallet, and it becomes, simply, a "unit load"—standardized, cubical, and ideally suited to being scooped up by the tines of a forklift. This allows your Cheerios and your oysters to be whisked through the supply chain with great efficiency; the gains are so impressive, in fact, that many experts consider the pallet to be the most important materials-handling innovation of the twentieth century." Although the technology was in place by the mid-1920s, pallets didn't see widespread adoption until World War II, when the challenge of keeping eight million G.I.s supplied—"the most enormous single task of distribution ever accomplished anywhere," according to one historian—gave new urgency to the science of materials handling. "The pallet really made it possible for us to fight a war on two fronts the way that we did." It would have been impossible to supply military forces in both the European and Pacific theaters if logistics operations had been limited to manual labor and hand-loading cargo.
To get a sense of the productivity gains that were achieved, consider the time it took to unload a boxcar before the advent of pallets. "According to an article in a 1931 railway trade magazine, three days were required to unload a boxcar containing 13,000 cases of unpalletized canned goods. When the same amount of goods was loaded into the boxcar on pallets or skids, the identical task took only four hours." Pallets, of course, are merely one cog in the global machine for moving things and while shipping containers have had their due, the humble pallet is arguably "the single most important object in the global economy."
To get a sense of the productivity gains that were achieved, consider the time it took to unload a boxcar before the advent of pallets. "According to an article in a 1931 railway trade magazine, three days were required to unload a boxcar containing 13,000 cases of unpalletized canned goods. When the same amount of goods was loaded into the boxcar on pallets or skids, the identical task took only four hours." Pallets, of course, are merely one cog in the global machine for moving things and while shipping containers have had their due, the humble pallet is arguably "the single most important object in the global economy."
Like many inventions, it's obvious with hind-sight. But palettes also required improvements elsewhere, such as factory floors that were reasonably level and solid, capable of supporting stacked palettes, and eventually racking.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
that can be seen from Space!
"The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger is a non-fiction book by Marc Levinson charting the historic rise of the intermodal container (shipping container) and how it changed the economic landscape of the global economy."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Box:_How_the_Shipping_Container_Made_the_World_Smaller_and_the_World_Economy_Bigger
Think of the dock works who lost their jobs due to this "marvelous" invention. It's this efficiency and automation we have to fight against or nobody will have a job again. /sarcasm
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
Obligatory.
Wooden Pallets!
I have hand loaded many of those standard sized shipping containers myself, with un-palleted materials, it takes two guys like 3-4 hours. And there is no reason that loading would be any faster than unloading.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
People understood the usefulness of the concept when the first pallets were built nearly a century ago, but a pallet isn't helpful without lift trucks, cranes, etc. That's why adoption started slow and accelerated over time.
Pallets are definitely a lot better than handling loose goods, but I'm surprised that they haven't been improved upon in the last few decades. They aren't really stack-able, goods usually have to be saran rapped to them, etc. I wonder why some kind of collapsible shipping container like pallet hasn't been widely introduced? You see something similar in manufacturing quite often but never in retail transit (unless you count the bins that returned pop cans/bottles are put in).
there are approximately two billion wooden shipping pallets in the holds of tractor-trailers in the United States transporting Honey Nut Cheerios
Arguably, pallets are just accessories for the machine that actually does the work. I'd like to see people unload a boxcar full of pallets by hand.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
I did a PC refresh job with another guy at a local hospital where the IT department stored old equipment inside a chain-link cage inside a warehouse-style storage room. This was also where construction debris from other parts of the hospital were dumped here.The place was a disaster area -- and our new work area.
Since our first PC shipment wasn't expected for another three days, we spent that time cleaning up. Finding a pallet-sized box with low walls, we hauled out ten pallets of construction debris to the dumpster on the first day. We sorted and organized equipment to pallets on the second day. And, finally, we hauled everything out of the cage to sweep and mop the floor on the third day. Thereafter, people complained they couldn't find anything because we stacked everything on pallets. :/
We eventually deployed 750 PC's and 1,500 monitors. Every two weeks we got 10+ pallets of equipment that filled our work area. A week of unboxing, a week of deploying. This became the rhythm of the project. All the old equipment (minus the labeled hard drives that we kept in case we needed to pull data) got boxed up on pallets for the recycler. On the final day of the project, we left the cage clean and empty than it was before.
Later on I cleaned up an IT storage room filled with old equipment that no one have seen the floor in over eight years. That took six weeks of my spare time between tasks to clean up. Most of the old equipment ended up on pallets for the recycler. After I got the room completely empty, I had facility come in to mop and wax the floor.
Depending on where and how the wood in the pallets is processed, pallets can host invasive wood-boring insects. Locally we're having problems with the Asian longhorn beetle which is believed to have been introduced to Massachusetts via shipping pallets and crates. A lot of port cities and major shipping centers have seen outbreaks.
There are plastic and metal pallet systems that should be used if shipping long distances.
Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!
Vote for Bernie in 2016!
This comment was on a pallet.
But the longshoremen were on break. Union rules, sorry.
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ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
have long sung the praises of the lowly pallet which protects our stuff from the occasional 'water event' as we call them in the Northwest.
Fifty years of Yippie! 1968-2018
Whereas the Microsoft Ribbon is an abomination.
Just for the record barrels were probably equally revolutionary in their time. And the ability for a person to roll them before machinery was quite an advantage.
And forklifts. The invention actually consists of two parts to be really successful - the second part being the forklift or pallet jack. Moving pallets by hand sucks.
In the early 1990's CHEP got very aggressive about tracking its palettes and you had to make sure you had some on site so if a truck (lorry) dropped a load off and there were CHEP palettes you had some more to put on the back of the load for the return trip or you needed to keep some transfer palettes to unload CHEP ones onto.
It was ok to a point but they were hard to keep track off, especially in a ad hoc logistics facility where old equipment was being stored.
Once upon a time you buy a slab (box of stubbies) of beer for about 4 CHEP palettes so you had to keep them under lock and key or they would go missing (on Fridays). Remember that these things are rented and we used to have conduct census. Occasionally one would get completely smashed and you would repair it enough so that it could be returned.
There was another company called LOSCAM, they had purple palettes and for a while you had to keep supply of those as well.
The CHEP Palette was a well built thing and could take 1000Kg easily, the white wood ones this article refers to were single use only, sucked royally and yea you could only enter them from two sides..
Summary says:
the challenge of keeping eight million G.I.s supplied—"the most enormous single task of distribution ever accomplished anywhere,"
I wonder how USSR managed it, since they have an even greater amount of soldier deployed
alt.fan.pallets
Recycle PCs and build a wireless community network www.hillsborough.org.nz
My buddy and I used to unload 22,000 cases in 4 hours. On skids it took 10 minutes (with power jacks). What kinda blowhards were unloading those trailers back in the 20's and 30's that 30k took days??!
While am no fan of Hugh Pickens, I do love pallets and logistics in general, and like this article.
As my dad is a truck driver, as a kid I would go with him on trips and see the inner workings of the industry that literally keeps the country rolling. Most trucks would take on empty pallets in exchange for full ones they offloaded. But the trucks did not always go back to the same location that they made the pickup at. I asked him once what happens to all the extra pallets that end up at the receiving end? He told me that eventually some truck would come by and pick the old pallets all up to try to load balance. The pallet truck was always this old beat up truck that looked like it was on the verge of dying.
But I asked him where new pallets come from, and he just smiled and said "obviously it is the pallet fairys."
As an adult I once saw a truck filled with brand new wooden pallets while driving on the highway. Even the truck looked brand new.
But now with the hard plastic GPS tracking pallets, I can imagine that the pallets themselves have some value and have to be tracked even when empty. Lucky for them they have GPS, I suppose.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
I work for a large annual convention, and at our most recent event we took our first baby steps into using pallets. We got a bunch of plastic pallets and a pallet jack to move them.
For us, it's about doing our load-in and load-out at the venue quickly. Before, we'd have one or two trucks doing the rounds between our storage space and the venue. The trucks would arrive, and then we'd load everything into the trucks one piece at a time (using boxes, at least), and then the trucks would go off and we'd sit on the loading dock waiting for them to return. With pallets, the trucks arrive, we stick the pallets in with the pallet jack, the trucks (very quickly leave), and then while waiting for the truck to return we're loading stuff onto pallets and wrapping it for the next truck. By the time the truck has returned, the pallets are ready to load.
We're not fully converted to using pallets, but the first steps have already shown us how much extra speed we can get out of them, mostly just by letting our people work on loading the trucks before the trucks even get to the dock.
Now THIS is how you unload that kind of thing.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
True story: When working in Thailand, an American engineer noticed that all of the pallets were made of plastic. This seemed strange, so he asked. The Thai engineers said "What, you don't have termites in the US?" He said "Sure, but we don't place the pallets on the dirt, we only place them on concrete". The Thai engineers asked "You mean your termites can't just walk across a few feet of concrete?" The US engineer frowned and said "Well, I'm sure they could but they just don't." The Thai engineers laughed and said "Our termites are more... ambitious... than yours."
Although the pallet was great it was superseded, in my opinion, by the shipping container invented by Malcolm McLean who enabled economies of scale with his invention. I first head of him when Malcolm Gladwell spoke about him and told his story at TIBCO NOW conference last month. Here is the wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...
this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom. -- Lincoln, Gettysburg Address
The author writes:
"While it took about 55-60 days for a supply ship leaving from New York City to reach Liverpool, England, the trip from San Francisco to Brisbane often lasted four or five months."
Shipping from New York to Liverpool took nowhere near this long. Liberty ships (not built for speed) routinely made the trip in 15-20 days - even allowing for anti-sub maneuvering and combat. I can't find ready information for the Pacific but I think the author has (at least) doubled the required time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberty_ship
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convoys_HX_229/SC_122
One of the biggest costs is repatriation of the pallet. Crack that and the pool becomes a lot more viable and cost effective.
the humble pallet is arguably "the single most important object in the global economy."
The word arguably is "the lazy writer’s synonym for 'not.' For example: 'The Red Sox are arguably the strongest team in the American League East.'" --- Alex Beam
Where they on?
In the UK 3 people can unload a 40' container in 4 hours, no pallets, no forklift, just handballing.
I worked for a pallet company that serviced Chicago and surrounding areas. Had to sign a release form that I would never disclose the design of their pallets.
Never realized it was such a big deal? Then I began a career in transportation and discovered the vast differences in pallets. Chep pallets, specialty pallets, hard wood, soft wood, plastic. Some on a exchange, some are not.
with what the rest of the world uses, because they insist on custom non-metric sizes. Just like paper. There are many more Euro pallets in use than US-sized ones.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EUR-pallet
Though in this case, the US size may actually win in the long term, because standard containers are designed to accomodate US pallets optimally. The Euro variant does not fit as well. There is a slightly wider Euro container variant designed to play nicely with Euro pallets, but with ever increasing ocean-crossing container shipping, these are on the way out.
One problem of the smallest variant of the US pallet (35 × 45.5 inch Milspec, 40 × 48 standard type) is that is does not fit trough standard European doors (which are 850 mm - Euro pallets are 800 mm, US mil pallets are 889 mm on the smallest side, standard type even larger).
Unfortunately, pallets are also the major way that tree-destroying insects travel from ecosystem to ecosystem. Pallets are so cheap and disposable that nobody will spend the time/money to either sterilize them or replace them with a material that doesn't harbor insects.
When you kiss goodbye to America's ash trees in about a decade (emerald ash borer), or any other tree species threatened around the world by invasive bugs, you can partly thank palletization of global trade.
The Truckie above is right about CHEP pallets. These blue pallets with white lettering are ubiquitous in Australia, and there are a number of yards at which you can pick them up and drop them off.
Because it's a rental thing and pallets aren't free to manufacture, there's a penalty if you don't bring them back. AND -- amazingly -- it is at least sometimes NOT on the people who picked them up, or loaded or unloaded them, but on the person who authorised the job with the contractor, who may not have ever even SEEN the pallets in question.
Why would this happen? Because anyone can rock up to a CHEP yard with a bunch of blue pallets and receive back, in cash, the deposit for said pallets. Going pallet-hunting is apparently not an uncommon activity among Australian tradesman after a big night of drinking when the next payday is still days away. Most of us would have no reason to know this, and presumably the economy somewhat relies on this, but basically an unguarded CHEP pallet is like a $100 note (or whatever the deposit is... as I recall, it isn't a small number) sitting on the ground.
So, a friend of mine, in charge of maintenance for a piece of public infrastructure, one day had some maintenance done. The supplies for this apparently came on CHEP pallets. He knows this not because he'd ever been TOLD about any CHEP pallets by the workers... but because one day CHEP sent him a bill for $4,000. He wrote back, don't know anything about your pallets, never seen 'em, don't have 'em, not paying this invoice. SOMEHOW this degenerated into a personal attack by CHEP on him, calling him at home, nagging him for these pallets he'd had nothing to do with. It went on for months. His management backed him on not paying the invoice, but that didn't help in the context of CHEP taking the dispute personal.
One day he got sick and tired of this, and called up the contractors in the middle of the night. "Round up your mates, and round up a big-ass truck. We're going for a drive." And they drove around all night, picking up any blue pallet that wasn't nailed down. Final count it was something like hundreds of them, if I recall correctly. They dropped them off at CHEP. He used the funds to pay the CHEP invoice and pocketed the rest and told the contractors they better not ever say another word about this.
Apparently in recent years, CHEP has begun to bar code pallets so they can track them, so I have no idea if they're still easy, untraceable currency as they were 5+ years ago.
Not to bust your imagination, but to build on the idea I figure that the first 'fork lifts' were actually intended to move heavy equipment. Lots of generators and such have cuts in their support platforms to support movement by fork. Now, Initially I figure they moved equipment via crane and such, but moving industrial equipment without dealing with a huge high roof is a lot easier if you can come in from below, to to mention that you need a frame anyways even if you're using a crane - as equipment gets heavier the less likely any random point you might hook into will be able to support the equipment without damage. You just need less framing if you're doing it via clever cuts in the floor stand.
Go back to the 'old days' on non-standardization, I can see a company that uses heavy equipment having some device, a sort of proto-jack, to move their equipment around, then deciding, hey, we can use this jack to help move supplies around! Perhaps with something more expensive/better built than modern pallets, which are built to be cheap.
I don't read AC A human right
Episode 545: The Blue Pallet
If you don't listen to Planet Money, you should.
... the forklift. Nor, methinks, the lowly carton.
Former warehouse worker for a Kraft warehouse here.
Cherrio's, and all other cereals are not transported on wooden pallets. Lightweight, boxed items, are positioned on corrugated pads and use a special forklift attachment commonly known as a 'slip sheeter' to haul them around. This cuts down on the cost, weight, and logistics associated with moving products. Pallets are not used in international transport, as well. The containers for this are usually hand packed to maximize each shipping container's capacity.
Aaaand I'm out. Have fun guys.
And the award for Best Employee of the 20th Century goes to...
This inanimate wooden pallet!
my, your, his/her/its, our, your, their
I'm, you're, he's/she's/it's, we're, you're, they're
Solution: a pallet tax. The money from the tax will go to ... well, nevermind where the money goes. We need to tax these job-killing pallets now!
FWIW, the longshoremen solution is a container royalty central collection fund which is like a "tax" for intermodal shipping containers... The money from this "tax" goes to... the few folks that got to keep their jobs (to pay for lost employment opportunities).
There isn't a specific pallet tax that I know of... Yet... (although there are often redemption-like fee associated with pallets)
OF COURSE! What on this entire Earth of ours could be more incredible and more complex and more powerful? Wow!
You've still got a fairly expensive asset sitting idle.
Then there's the extra labour to move one box at a time - with ladders. You might be eight feet tall, but most people aren't.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."