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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."
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!
You can unload 13,000 cases of unpalletized canned goods in four hours, the same amount of time it takes anyone else with pallets? That's pretty fucking amazing, I must say.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
Ok, who left the door open and let the union guy in?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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.
>If you broke the pallets down and remove the nails...
You're doing it wrong - break the pallets down by breaking them - a maul or sledgehammer will usually do the job nicely. Then burn them and drag a magnet through the ashes to collect the nails. Why go through all the effort of removing the nails when you're about to remove the wood?
Of course given the number or lazy, irresponsible assholes in the world who would just leave the nails to wreak havoc on the next people to use the area I can't say I'd be surprised if the law required pre-extraction.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Yes, I liked how palettes went from 16 colors on the Commodore 64, to 4096 on the original Amiga, then we had True Color and 24 bit and all that jazz.
But what does this have to do with shipping pallets? Your comment has left a bad taste in my palate.
Personally, I find either brand to be unpalatable.
Have gnu, will travel.
Just for the record, barrels are a menace.
Signed,
Mario.
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