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When a Bike Company Put a TV on Its Box, Shipping Damages Went Down (2017)

bicycling.com

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Re: When a Bike Company Put a TV on Its Box, Shipping Damages Went Down (2017)

#161

Post by MikeTheGreat »

closeparen wrote: post #112
chrisseaton wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Even the most law-abiding delivery company is going to end up with some parking tickets Why? If you don’t park illegally you don’t get tickets. They aren’t random or accidental.

In a crowded urban neighborhood, there is not going to be anywhere for a delivery vehicle to legally stop. Unless the delivery company refuses to service the area, it’s going to do some double parking. Downtowns address this problem with yellow commercial loading zones but those don’t really exist in residential neighborhoods.

The companies could also hire a second person to actually run the deliveries inside while the driver makes sure not to block traffic.

It'll cost more than the current situation, sure, but it is an option.

Re: When a Bike Company Put a TV on Its Box, Shipping Damages Went Down (2017)

#162

Post by stordoff »

coygui wrote: post #65
justinhensley wrote: post #31

I've always been curious about the shipping process. I have met or know 7 people who work/worked at the shipping hub in my city. I always ask them how the packages are handled. Every one of them said that they (and all of their coworkers) handle all packages on a scale ranging from rough to purposefully damaging. One guy told me how he targets boxes marked Fragile for extra abuse when he's exhausted/angry/having a ba…

Similar story happened in school as ta, if a student did something bad or annoyed the TAs, they would Target the student and give a bad or zero grade on problems that can not give a back/white answer. This is usually on marking final exams because few students will review the marking and thus few if any consequences will happen.

Are they not anonymous? You might be able to recognise it by the work, but at my university, marking was done by people sufficiently far from teaching individual students to ensure that is not the case.

Re: When a Bike Company Put a TV on Its Box, Shipping Damages Went Down (2017)

#163

Post by PSZD »

jen729w wrote: post #35
justinhensley wrote: post #31

I've always been curious about the shipping process. I have met or know 7 people who work/worked at the shipping hub in my city. I always ask them how the packages are handled. Every one of them said that they (and all of their coworkers) handle all packages on a scale ranging from rough to purposefully damaging. One guy told me how he targets boxes marked Fragile for extra abuse when he's exhausted/angry/having a ba…

You know these people, so do you have any insight as to why they did this? Is it envy? “Screw this guy getting his fancy TV that I don’t have.” If not, what? It seems needlessly cruel. I assume these are good people?

Working at a large brown shipping company, I've never seen anyone go out of their way to mistreat packages marked as fragile (or anyone talk about doing it).

That said, it's policy not to treat packages marked 'fragile' differently. Boxes get reused a lot, and a sticker like that has very little correlation with it actually being fragile. (60lb box of bolts? Fragile! 2' by 4' mirror that shatters from a 1 ft drop? Not fragile!)

For bicycles in particular, the issue IMO is that they're typically packed terribly, while being large and awkward enough to be handled with all the other large and heavy (70-150 lbs) stuff.

Damages will occur, it's just a matter of statistical frequency at a scale of 20 million packages per day handled by 100,000+ employees. Frequently, the damage won't even be discovered until delivery, and then there's no easy way to attribute the damage properly. That means aside from particularly egregious stuff where it's obvious you screwed up (say, laying a 55" TV flat and dropping a 30 lb box on it) you have to go way up the management chain to find anyone who cares. At a lower level, easily measured metrics like process rate are far more important.

If everyone in management you ever interacted with only measured your performance by LOC written, how much time would you spend refactoring?

Re: When a Bike Company Put a TV on Its Box, Shipping Damages Went Down (2017)

#164

Post by PSZD »

chrsstrm wrote: post #88
mikeash wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s easier to be rough than to be gentle, so if there are no consequences to being rough, that’s naturally how it’ll end up.

That's not always true. It might seem like it is easier to be careless, but if we're talking about any item over just a couple pounds in weight, you're going to hurt yourself being careless as opposed to being cautious. There is a monumental difference between throwing 20lb packages all day vs. picking them up and setting them down. Your body will tell you that it's just not sustainable in the long run if you want to…

I'd say being "careless" means dropping that 60-80lb package to the floor instead of gingerly doing a squat with it, even 10 of those a day and your back will thank you unless you have impeccable form. "Use existing equipment" - perhaps a familiar phrase, one that protects your joints but not necessarily the packages.

Re: When a Bike Company Put a TV on Its Box, Shipping Damages Went Down (2017)

#166

Post by [deleted] »

esotericn wrote: post #42
jen729w wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know these people, so do you have any insight as to why they did this? Is it envy? “Screw this guy getting his fancy TV that I don’t have.” If not, what? It seems needlessly cruel. I assume these are good people?

I'd imagine it's some combination of: - terrible pay - long hours - silly computerised targets It's difficult to care about your job if your job doesn't care about you.

[deleted]

Re: When a Bike Company Put a TV on Its Box, Shipping Damages Went Down (2017)

#167

Post by jdironman »

ascar wrote: post #146
Judgmentality wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So in the cases where the drivers don't own the delivery vehicles, just deduct the fines from whoever was driving it at the time of the ticket. I admittedly have no idea how these situations are handled by accounting, but that seems like it would be the solution to me.

The solution is the company just pays the ticket. End of story.

The solution should be repeat offenses equals harsher consequences.

Re: When a Bike Company Put a TV on Its Box, Shipping Damages Went Down (2017)

#168

Post by dang »

NullPrefix wrote: post #97
btrettel wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This does not surprise me much. I think it comes down to incentives. The package handlers only have a certain amount of time per package. There are few if any consequences for being rough, and it saves time, so of course the package handlers end up being rough. This isn't the only time you see this sort of selfish behavior from delivery companies. As a cyclist I commonly encounter delivery trucks parked in the bike l…

Empty his tire. Make sure it's visible to him when he comes back.

Please don't.

Bike vs. car flamewars are surprisingly close to the nastiest things we see here. Not to mention tedious.

Re: When a Bike Company Put a TV on Its Box, Shipping Damages Went Down (2017)

#169

Post by Fiaxhs »

The_suffocated wrote: post #23

The effect of this trick will diminish quickly when everyone copies it. I wonder why this bike company was eager to reveal their trick if it was so effective. Perhaps the free advertisements they gets from news reports are more worthwhile?

You still need to ship things that would make sense to fit in such a big box. It's obviously the free advertising.

Re: When a Bike Company Put a TV on Its Box, Shipping Damages Went Down (2017)

#170

Post by lphnull »

justinhensley wrote: post #31

I've always been curious about the shipping process. I have met or know 7 people who work/worked at the shipping hub in my city. I always ask them how the packages are handled. Every one of them said that they (and all of their coworkers) handle all packages on a scale ranging from rough to purposefully damaging. One guy told me how he targets boxes marked Fragile for extra abuse when he's exhausted/angry/having a ba…

Back in the day, I used to work at General Electric in the warehouse unloading and re-building pallets of GE lightbulbs for 8 hours straight.

One of my coworkers there was this guy who liked to play ska music really loud. His buddy that he talked to used to be really violent with the boxes- chucking some of them hard on purpose, trying to get some of the product to break.

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