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Whitewood Under Siege: Wooden Shipping Pallets

cabinetmagazine.org

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Re: Whitewood Under Siege: Wooden Shipping Pallets

#11

Post by mozey »

GFischer wrote: post #2

A really compelling read. How many hidden industries like the pallets one are out there, waiting for software (or hardware) aid or disruption? I mean, 3.5 billion in pallet-related revenues :) , and millions in losses due to lack of tracking... is RFID really the best solution?

I have actually written some software for keeping track of pallets. This was about 6 years ago. There was about 10K wooden pallets and 90K plastic crates to keep track of. We also had CHEP pallets. These had to be tracked separately and manually updated on CHEPs IE only website with no API. No RFIDs were involved. The system required two manual counts. One on pick up and another on delivery. If the two counts were way off, or one end was missing, the shipment would be flagged. It kind of worked.

Re: Whitewood Under Siege: Wooden Shipping Pallets

#12

Post by msandford »

GFischer wrote: post #7
msandford wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much does a pallet cost to manufacture and how much does a lo-jack cost to implant? Further, how much does it cost to keep the lo-jack running for a decade? I used to run a 10,000 sqft logistics facility (really tiny in that world) and we kept a stock of about 20 pallets. I seem to remember the wooden ones costing $2-$5 used and the plastic ones less than $50 new. The most expensive pallets I could find from U-Li…

I work for an insurance company. The company currently pays for lo-jacks for high-end cars, and has often studied the cost of installing some variant of it for the entire fleet. A GPS car tracker costs a lot less than what you're quoting, when purchased in bulk from China (I don't know about reliability figures though :) ). I think it was in the U$ 15 range for the entire thing. Certainly not the armored thing you're…

Yeah $15 for the electronics. $20 to $100 for the battery depending on how good your hardware/software is. Probably a cast aluminum case, and then some way to get the antenna out. Plus the whole thing has to be rugged enough to survive the injection molding process which is no joke.

Worse is that even if the ENTIRE lo-jack is built into a single monolithic chip (which will take millions to engineer) you still have to power the thing. The transistors might be getting exponentially cheaper but the batteries aren't. And you need quite a bit of batteries to make this happen.

If you can get a fix to a warehouse you're OK but once the pallets go into an intermodal shipping container and stacked, you're SOL. Shipping container bottoms are made out of wood, not steel so sitting up on a truck they can still get signals. But once they're stacked you're in a world of hurt. Sure the containers might pop back onto the grid once they get unstacked but that might happen once they're out of the country, potentially to countries where you don't have subsidiaries who can go get them back.

So you have two fixed costs: batteries and data/cellular. You have to buy these and you have to pay for them on an ongoing basis. I think what would end up happening is that your battery and data (and plastic recycling and lo-jack refurbishing) costs will end up eating whatever profits you might manage to eke out such that it's not that great of a business to be in.

Re: Whitewood Under Siege: Wooden Shipping Pallets

#13

Post by sxcurry »

quinndupont wrote: post #4

Stunning to see Cabinet Magazine being referenced on HN. For those that don't know, Cabinet is an excellent magazine that covers many topics, but has something of a philosophy and art focus. Great article, as always.

This is why I read HN - fascinating article, knowledge of an industry I had never thought about before, and a heads up about a new source of information, Cabinet Magazine. Thanks, HN!

Re: Whitewood Under Siege: Wooden Shipping Pallets

#14

Post by nwenzel »

phpnode wrote: post #8
msandford wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much does a pallet cost to manufacture and how much does a lo-jack cost to implant? Further, how much does it cost to keep the lo-jack running for a decade? I used to run a 10,000 sqft logistics facility (really tiny in that world) and we kept a stock of about 20 pallets. I seem to remember the wooden ones costing $2-$5 used and the plastic ones less than $50 new. The most expensive pallets I could find from U-Li…

lojack won't work for the reasons you mention, RFID really is the best solution because it's cheap and they don't need to change their existing inventory. There's no need for plastic pallets, they could embed the RFID tags into each of the wooden blocks which make up the corners of the pallet. If one doesn't already exist, it's probably quite simple to produce a nailgun like device which literally shoots an RFID tag…

All of the examination of costs in the comments assume a zero cost of enforcement. Free courts, free police, free jailing or fine enforcement of any violators.

Without that free enforcement, these $5-$50 items would not be worth fighting over.

I don't believe that police protection should be a fee-for-service business, but are there no checks and balances on the use of public services for private gain?

Re: Whitewood Under Siege: Wooden Shipping Pallets

#15

Post by phpnode »

nwenzel wrote: post #14
phpnode wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

lojack won't work for the reasons you mention, RFID really is the best solution because it's cheap and they don't need to change their existing inventory. There's no need for plastic pallets, they could embed the RFID tags into each of the wooden blocks which make up the corners of the pallet. If one doesn't already exist, it's probably quite simple to produce a nailgun like device which literally shoots an RFID tag…

All of the examination of costs in the comments assume a zero cost of enforcement. Free courts, free police, free jailing or fine enforcement of any violators. Without that free enforcement, these $5-$50 items would not be worth fighting over. I don't believe that police protection should be a fee-for-service business, but are there no checks and balances on the use of public services for private gain?

Your argument applies to theft of any low value item. If a shopkeeper presses charges against a shoplifter, are they using public services for private gain? Should there be checks in place to stop shopkeepers from reporting too many thieves?

Re: Whitewood Under Siege: Wooden Shipping Pallets

#16

Post by stephengillie »

MisterBastahrd wrote: post #10

Note: I worked for a large grocery chain for 7 years Plastic pallets are vastly superior in the long run to wooden pallets in terms of durability, and many companies have used them for almost two decades interchangeably with wooden pallets. One of the issues here is that once a pallet enters the supply chain, who knows if or when you'll get them back. When I first started working for the grocery chain, there were ove…

I also worked in the grocery industry for most of a decade.

My sister worked for local fast food and general retail chains (Taco Time & Target) and I was always amazed at the lack of palletization they used. Target especially.

Target sends several trucks a day to each store. Each truck is half-full, and half of that freight is simply "stevedoered" into the truck, not put on pallets. So emptying a truck is a several-hour process of moving individual boxes of merchandise out of a truck by hand. What pallets they do use are often poorly stacked (by retail grocery standards), not well wrapped, and often fall over in transport.

Wal-Mart, by comparison, looks to have embraced the same "CHEP-only" policy as Costco.

Re: Whitewood Under Siege: Wooden Shipping Pallets

#17

Post by stephengillie »

Interestingly, this article completely leaves out soda (aka pop aka coke) pallets. All of the major soft drink bottlers use about the same size and shape pallet, and it's much smaller than the traditional whitewood pallet. Often, they'll put their pallet onto a square pallet, then that one a whitewood pallet, when they deliver to grocery stores.

Pepsi, Coke, and other soft drink and beer distribution companies even have their own, smaller, powered pallet jacks. The powered pallet jacks that grocery and other retail stores use are usually too big for these smaller pallets.

These companies have been slowly moving to plastic pallets over the past decade, and wooden pallets of those dimensions are hard to find today. The plastic pallets offer some level of 4-way access as well.

---

Edit: I had forgotten about these full-size plastic pallets. They are so much cleaner and easier to use. Even new whitewood pallets leave behind a cloud of splinters and wood dust. These leave behind some shipping dust as there are no cracks for dust to fall through. They stack more securely and don't get heavier when wet like wooden pallets. And you can stack about twice as many in the same space.

http://www.foodlogistics.com/article/11442316/smaller-faster...

Re: Whitewood Under Siege: Wooden Shipping Pallets

#19

Post by jessaustin »

Maybe this is a rare streak of jingoism for me, but it seems odd that a foreign company has been able to come in and dictate through the courts that the whole industry should work on a completely different model. Perhaps the reason "blue" is such a good deal for shippers is because much of the real cost has been transferred to third parties. ISTM the courts should force CHEP to include a significant deposit in its contracts, or else forgo the discounted forced labor of the recyclers. It wouldn't have to be a 100% deposit, but it would have to be high enough so that shipping destinations were no longer indifferent to whether the pallet was returned to CHEP or recycled or stolen.

Re: Whitewood Under Siege: Wooden Shipping Pallets

#20

Post by batmansbelt »

stephengillie wrote: post #16
MisterBastahrd wrote: post #10

Note: I worked for a large grocery chain for 7 years Plastic pallets are vastly superior in the long run to wooden pallets in terms of durability, and many companies have used them for almost two decades interchangeably with wooden pallets. One of the issues here is that once a pallet enters the supply chain, who knows if or when you'll get them back. When I first started working for the grocery chain, there were ove…

I also worked in the grocery industry for most of a decade. My sister worked for local fast food and general retail chains (Taco Time & Target) and I was always amazed at the lack of palletization they used. Target especially. Target sends several trucks a day to each store. Each truck is half-full, and half of that freight is simply "stevedoered" into the truck, not put on pallets. So emptying a truck is a several-h…

What's taco time?
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