Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Whitewood Under Siege: Wooden Shipping Pallets
21–30 of 73 posts
Re: Whitewood Under Siege: Wooden Shipping Pallets
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
An inferior version of Taco Bell, often found in Canadian food courts.
Re: Whitewood Under Siege: Wooden Shipping Pallets
#23Maybe 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 co…
...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.
Remove the word "foreign" and that statement still makes sense and it still describes an objectionable state of affairs. No jingoism required.
Re: Whitewood Under Siege: Wooden Shipping Pallets
#24Earlier 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…
The problem with RFID for pallets is that the logistics space is still too decentralized. I work for a company which does a lot of custom RFID integration (we have worked with the companies in the article for tracking pallets.)
First, the RF properties of inserting RFID tags into wooden pallets just doesn't work well; it is far better to stick a label on the outside of the pallet. But then you get into durability issues, etc. So iGPS really had the right idea here, with molding the tags into the actual plastic pallet itself. Great read range.
The other problem is the hugely distributed nature of the supply chain. Pallet poolers like CHEP just don't have the resources to stick an RFID reader at every location that can possibly accept pallets, and distributors / store locations have no incentive to help CHEP out with returning accidentally-delivered CHEP pallets. RFID readers are unfortunately not cheap enough for CHEP to start parking readers everywhere to see where their pallets go.
Trust me, as a manufacturer of RFID readers, our company would absolutely love a scenario where RFID readers start being embedded in every trailer and on every forklift, however realistically that solution is still at least a few years out, and the cost needs to come down probably another order of magnitude to be practical for use in the pallet industry. iGPS was just too early to the game.
Re: Whitewood Under Siege: Wooden Shipping Pallets
#25There's also an interesting system in Europe called EUR-pallet. [0]
They are usually made out of higher quality wood and quite durable. The system works by trading pallets for pallets, so if you receive some goods on a EUR pallet the driver takes an empty EUR pallet from your stack and it'll be reused at the other company.
Re: Whitewood Under Siege: Wooden Shipping Pallets
#26Re: Whitewood Under Siege: Wooden Shipping Pallets
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's taco time?
An inferior version of Taco Bell, often found in Canadian food courts.
It's really strange to hear you describe one as inferior when they barely sell the same food. True, they both sell food based around Mexican staples of corn, beans, tomatoes, spices, and meat, but that's as far as the similarities go.
Taco Bell has trouble proving that up to 35% of its beef comes from cows: http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2011/01/24/lawsuit-filed-in...
Taco Time's ground beef isn't even frozen: http://www.tacotime.com/menu/
Re: Whitewood Under Siege: Wooden Shipping Pallets
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 $100 for the battery depending on how good your hardware/software is. Probably a cast aluminum case, and then some way to get the antenna out. Plus the whole thing has to be rugged enough to survive the injection molding process which is no joke. Worse is that even if the ENTIRE lo-jack is built into a single monolithic chip (which will take millions to engineer) you still have to…
Aren't shipping containers steel all around? They do have wooden flooring though, but under that is steel from what I understand.
Re: Whitewood Under Siege: Wooden Shipping Pallets
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
I work for an insurance company. The company currently pays for lo-jacks for high-end cars, and has often studied the cost of installing some variant of it for the entire fleet. A GPS car tracker costs a lot less than what you're quoting, when purchased in bulk from China (I don't know about reliability figures though :) ). I think it was in the U$ 15 range for the entire thing. Certainly not the armored thing you're…
Yeah $15 for the electronics. $20 to $100 for the battery depending on how good your hardware/software is. Probably a cast aluminum case, and then some way to get the antenna out. Plus the whole thing has to be rugged enough to survive the injection molding process which is no joke. Worse is that even if the ENTIRE lo-jack is built into a single monolithic chip (which will take millions to engineer) you still have to…
IMO, one random update per week is good enough to get most of the value from lojacking the things which would drastically lower your power needs. Probably not low enough for parasitic power draw but low enough to spend less than 5$ on the battery.
Re: Whitewood Under Siege: Wooden Shipping Pallets
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Interestingly, that's actually a rather unclear question. There are (at least) two fast food franchises that bear the name "Taco Time".
The largest Taco Time is an international chain of restaurants, found in the US and Canada[0].
The smaller Taco Time, officially Taco Time Northwest is a franchise local to Washington State, largely the greater Seattle area, where I grew up[1].
Taco Time NW has generally higher quality food than most other fast food restaurants, and seems "higher end". I always really enjoyed going there, and when I moved I was surprised to find these other places named "Taco Time" that were really different.