About shipping
One of the products I deal with daily is made of glass, plastic, and metal. They usually weigh about 10 pounds and retail from $200 each to about $1500 each. The one I talk about today is worth a little over $500. Included in that retail price is maybe $2 worth of packaging. Also factored into that retail price is the outrageously high number of damage claims due to shipping and handling. They get tossed around. Back in the day, shippers used to mark a package “Fragile” or “Handle With Care”. Apparently, that isn’t enough any more. To the rescue comes a new kind of warning label. I received a package that sported one of these yesterday. Mine was green. As Adrian Monk might say, “Here’s the thing”: The product was in its own box. The shipping genius then fashioned another, MUCH larger box out of two boxes that he/she must have had lying around and placed the product inside of it with no other packing material whatsoever and slapped that green warning label on it. It was kind of like a shoe box with only one shoe in it. If you move or tilt the larger box, the smaller one inside was going to get jostled. The warning label did what it was supposed to do. It was RED when I saw it which meant it received rough handling. Luckily, the product inside was undamaged.
I deal with another product daily that is hazardous. You have to be certified to ship hazardous material but you don’t have to be certified to receive hazardous material. Someone else needs to figure out the logic to that because it still mystifies me. Anyway, these products retail from $600 to $800 and are labeled “Explosive: Ground Shipping Only” or something like that. They get tossed around, too. Not only do they get tossed around but I once received one of these where a shipping genius slapped an overnight air freight label over the “Explosive: Ground Shipping Only” label and put it on an air carrier. That one came to me sometime after the ValuJet crash because I remember thinking about it. The thought that something intended for me could cause an airliner to go down? It bothered me. Hopefully, that sort of thing can't happen any more but yesterday's incident doesn't give me much comfort.
NO ONE IS READING THE LABELS
Got any shipping nightmares? I probably have another couple of hundred but I'd like to hear yours.
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Meeting all the groovey people
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We danced around with Borey Alice
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Deep Purple, Space Truckin'
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It never ceases to amaze me how people's brains can turn off when it comes to shipping. They'll engineer, produce, and manage to sell a high value product and then literally save a buck by scrimping on the packing materials.
When I worked for a freight forwarder the shipments we could consolidate and palletize almost always arrived at their destination in good shape. Shipments that go through a UPS or Fedex as individual boxes may take a beating though. That's just the nature of the system and it's reflected in the cost. Many years ago I worked at a UPS hub and it wasn't like anyone went out of their way to abuse packages, it's just no one had any time to pay much attention to "fragile" labels.
Hazmat was a different thing though, both at UPS and the forwarder. Everybody paid attention to those labels and I don't know anyone who would have been stupid enough to cover a hazmat label. Maybe it happened at the forwarder and I just didn't know about it, but I don't think so. The company was pretty rigid about how hazmat had to be dealt with, no wink wink nudge nudge at all.
I think the reason that people don't have to have hazmat certification to get those materials is that people still have the right to be stupid. They don't have the right to hurt anyone else as their potential Darwin Award product makes its way to them, but once it gets there they are on their own. And to be fair, most of the people and companies who order those products know how to deal with them when they arrive.
This isn't a shipping nightmare, really, but a flashback to an example of old-school durability, kind neighbors, and willingness to fix what might look unfixable.
In the dawn of the VHS age at our house, we used to rent movies from a place called Captain Video. One Monday morning, one of us went to return a movie. But in the process of getting into the car, we put the tape, in its case, on the roof of the vehicle. Everyone's done that, right?
Here's what doesn't happen to everyone: We drove off, and in due course, the tape fell off the roof on a busy street. From the look of things later, it was run over more than once. The case was destroyed, and the cassette was mangled. But still, some do-gooding Berkeley passer-by saw the thing out on the street, saw a Captain Video sticker on the thing, and *returned it* to the store.
When we realized the tape was missing, we called CV and told them we'd lost the movie--my wife probably still remembers what it was. They called back a little while later and said, don't worry, somebody just brought it back. Yes, it might be damaged, but let us try to fix it. They did, by putting the tape into a new cassette case. They never charged us a nickel.
"They'll engineer, produce, and manage to sell a high value product and then literally save a buck by scrimping on the packing materials."
Most companies in America went into a cost-cutting frenzy about 10-12 years ago, Dave. It still lingers today and this is one of the natural results. A freight depot that might have been dealing with 100 somethings per day with 12 people then is now handling 600 somethings per day with 5 people. Most companies today are under-equipped and under-staffed and it shows.
I agree with you, too, Dan. To an extent. I think most people are willing to handle a package with care even today. When they get to the 79th of 120 packages ... not so much.
My last employer was one of UPS' biggest customers in the area. One day my supervisor signed for a shipment, but after opening boxes, we realized we clearly had someone else's stuff (hand-blown glass bowls & plates.) Rather than carefully repackaging them & calling UPS to come get them, my supervisor was told to just throw them away. He did that, to my horror. When the woman who they belonged to showed up with the UPS driver a couple of weeks later, my supervisor shot me a "shut the hell up" look & denied that he'd ever even rec'd them (although it was clear that he'd signed for them.) The whole thing made me sick & among other concerns, made me quit not long afterwards.
Just the other day, however, I had to ship a couple of my paintings to a customer. Unfortunately I was unable to procure a decent box for them, so I called UPS, who said they sell boxes & had one that would fit my shipment. I made sure the paintings were sufficiently bubble-wrapped & brought them down to the UPS store. There I was told that the packaging would be over $20! When I complained about it, the boy working said they had to take special precautions when shipping glass. I told him there's no glass in there! You don't PUT glass over acrylic paint, as it will bubble & peel. I already bubble wrapped as much as they needed--I just needed them put in a box! He clearly didn't believe me, however, & he & another boy worker (neither could have been out of high school,) tried inspecting my bubble wrapped pkgs, looking for glass they wouldn't find. At the end of it all they shipped 2 paintings (that would have easily fit in 1 box,) in 2 boxes & charged me over $10 for them. Shipping was only $9 something. Needless to say, I won't be using UPS again. If anything, I'm currently considering writing UPS HQ...
I have no adequate words for your former supervisor, Lana. You're much braver than I for shipping paintings via UPS. The UPS boy lied about taking special precautions with glass. That may be the theory but it's definitely not the practice.