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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."
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 22 2014, @10:11AM
I wonder why Amazon doesn't box all of their catalogue into standard sized boxes. As it is they still need human pickers to pick out individual items; if it was all boxed it seems like they could be able to completely automate their warehouses. Of course there would be wasted space, but with a clever set of sizes to choose from (maybe along the lines of the ISO paper formats, where larger sizes are multiples of smaller sizes), they might be able to find an optimal balance.
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Monday December 22 2014, @10:32AM
This seems like one of those 'Why didn't i think of that...' moments.
I can only assume that the idea has been considered and, for some reason or other, has been discarded as being impractical or not financially sustainable. Maybe with Amazon's desire to get into the drone delivery market, this will the considered again. After all, it will make sense to maximize the load of any given drone and modern day passenger aviation has shown how this can be most efficiently achieved.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by lentilla on Monday December 22 2014, @01:28PM
The only reason that Amazon doesn't box everything in a small number of standard sizes is unlikely to be that they haven't already thought of it yet. It's much more likely to be because they don't yet own the entirety of the supply-chain. The companies that deliver products to consumers all have their own archaic rules for sizes and pricing.
One day, the delivery companies will work out that delivering a van-full of standard-size boxes costs them less than a ugly, mismatched collection. Then their pricing will be adjusted accordingly. At that point, Amazon will make the change and will make a killing.
Humans don't always do a good job "thinking outside the box" (heh heh). We are conditioned to think that a "small package" is easier to shift than a big package because we are so focused thinking about moving the item ourselves. It certainly made sense back in the day, when each individual parcel was moved: by-hand, by-horse, onto ship, off ship, etc. That's not necessarily the case anymore as we optimise each of the interconnecting systems ever more finely.
Now, if only we could get rid of the humans in the system, everything would be fantastic. Robots would make the products, robots would ship the products, and robots would consume the products.
More seriously, the only reason that Amazon isn't shipping everything in standard boxes is that the delivery mechanisms are still priced in the delivery-by-horseback era. I'm certain Amazon and friends are merely biding their time on this one.
(Score: 1) by WillAdams on Monday December 22 2014, @01:42PM
Problems with that: standardized boxes w/in boxes will rub and damage any outside printing --- also, any box which is dropped on its corner is guaranteed to damage one unit, while any dropped on an edge is likely to damage an entire column of units.