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

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

#201

Post by jon-wood »

chrisseaton wrote: post #109
eridius wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's cute, but wrong. Even the most law-abiding delivery company is going to end up with some parking tickets, so it makes sense to budget for them. You may as well decry the budgeting for legal as saying the company wants to break the law.

> 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.

I used to work for a delivery company on the software side. Our drivers were responsible for paying their own tickets, and there’d still be one or two a month.

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

#202

Post by hyperman1 »

reaperducer wrote: post #91
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…

the drivers are basically incentivized to break the law When a delivery company has a line item in its budget to cover parking tickets as a cost of doing business, it's already decided at the corporate level to disregard the law in favor of making a profit.

I remember how a few years ago a company paid a speeding ticket for one of the workers, and was promptly fined itself for contempt of court. Judge summoned the manager who approved the expense to court, gave him an earful, and told them in no uncertain terms that if they tried that again, contempt of court fines would go up until they stopped this. The ideas was the whole point of the ticket was to punish the driver, so if a company removes the punishment, they were actively sabotaging a legal punishment.

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

#204

Post by ricardobeat »

icebraining wrote: post #117
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.

Shit happens; signs are confusing, drivers make mistakes, cops make mistakes. And that may be a once in a lifetime event for a regular driver, but when you have thousands of drivers parking dozens of times a day, "once in a lifetime" becomes "once a week".

Except very special and rare situations, the driver should be personally liable for a ticket even if on the job. Traffic laws apply to individual drivers and not vehicle owners or contractors.

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

#206

Post by danilocesar »

btrettel wrote: post #53
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…

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…

Honestly, I think the truck drivers are also a victim of this system. They have to deliver what's handled to them in a tight schedule. Often breaking some rules and sometimes being rude on trafic is the way they found to meet the requirements and don't get punished.

I'm shure they could avoid doing a lot of those things, but blaming and punishing the truck driver is not fair.

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

#207

Post by gomox »

Sir_Substance wrote: post #199
undersuit wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My last bike came damaged. The box with the steel frame suffered a minor hit I didn't even notice it until after my shop reported the damage. Bent the right rear dropout less than two millimeters, dropouts are where the wheel axle connects to the frame. This prevented the rear tire from inserting and had bent the location of the rear derailleur mount. Repairing wouldn't necessarily be safe and would definitely invali…

This kind of thing weirds me out to be honest. I've had this kind of conversation with serious cyclists before where I've been told that it's impossible for cyclists to ride on the footpath in places because the uneven cement slabs would damage {some part of the bike I don't remember or care}. You're here telling me that a 2mm twist in part of the frame is a serious problem for attaching the rear wheel, and that it w…

It's quite hard to damage a dropout with the wheels mounted if not by way of a major crash.

But the rear triangle of a bike remains pretty weak in shipping as the rear axle is not in place.

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

#208

Post by jsjohnst »

cortesoft wrote: post #148
chrsstrm wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've worked on multiple shipping and loading docks. If you haven't had this type of work experience it would be difficult to understand that the entire line is one big connected system. If just one person stalls their part of the process, the other pieces both upstream and downstream are affected. And believe me, everyone on the line instantly knows who is falling behind and you'll begin to feel the eyes on you immed…

That all makes sense, but it doesn't explain why shipping workers would be EXTRA careless with items marked fragile. I would expect equal carelessness with all packages.

I feel another poster addressed that very well here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19010217

I especially agree with their point around properly packaging items.

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

#209

Post by rightbyte »

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.

Ye. Service vehicles usually are exempted from the actual parking rules in practice. A sewage utility vehicle wont get ticketed if it has a pipe going down a adjacent drain and has the wheels on the sidewalk etc.

Walking from a free parking spot to the delivery location is not included in the price. Unless all delivery companies are forced to follow the parking laws (for real) at the same time they will just go out of business.

The problem is that the end user don't know what quality of delivery they will get, so they choose the cheapest, and there is a race to the bottom, like flight tickets.

When comparing prices the end user doesn't know that they might be beaten off the plane by security to make room for a business class late arrival end user, so the risk is not priced in correctly ...

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

#210

Post by jon-wood »

Judgmentality wrote: post #129
eridius wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's cute, but wrong. Even the most law-abiding delivery company is going to end up with some parking tickets, so it makes sense to budget for them. You may as well decry the budgeting for legal as saying the company wants to break the law.

Don't the parking tickets have to be paid by the driver though, and not the company? FedEx doesn't even own their delivery trucks, the drivers do.

It depends on the company. The one I worked for (although not as a driver) the drivers were responsible for all tickets, traffic or parking. Other companies will swallow the cost, sometimes to a ridiculous degree, such as the London borough where Tesco racked up £75,000 worth of parking tickets in a year for delivery trucks dropping at their branches. https://www.hamhigh.co.uk/news/environment/75-000-parking-fi...
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