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 bad day.
I predict that a package being treated delicately throughout the entirety of it's route would be the outlier. Every package is at some point flung across a room/truck. The only question is if it is going to hit another box or a much harder surface.
this is all anecdotal, but seems to fit with the stat that roughly 10% of all packages in the United States are damaged during shipping.[0]
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 lane. This is a common problem: http://upshatescyclists.com/
If you call UPS or Fedex you'll often hear things like "This shouldn't happen." But the drivers are basically incentivized to break the law, regardless of "company policy". They don't have much time per package, so if blocking a bike lane saves them 10 seconds, they don't care if it is really dangerous for others.
Given this knowledge, I hypothesized that an effective way to make a delivery driver avoid the bike lane would be to slow them down if they park in the bike lane. I did once try to block a UPS driver from exiting their vehicle as a test. I recall that I said something like "You're blocking me, so I'm blocking you. You can park over there if you want a legal spot."
It wasn't the worst reaction I've seen from a UPS driver, but it was among the worst. Not recommended, but if enough cyclists did this then I suspect delivery drivers would start to avoid the bike lane.
> One guy gleefully told me how he targets boxes marked Fragile for extra abuse!
A close friend who owns a UPS franchise warned me of this behavior and advised against placing any indication of fragility on the box. If I recall the threshold correctly, $1,000+ declared-value packages are identified and set aside in a separate group within the store. When a driver comes by to pick up daily packages, the store clerk alerts the driver of which, if any, have been declared and these are individually handled with the sort of care that a customer would generally expect. The regular drivers that service his store appear to take the high-value thing quite seriously, but I do wonder how far down the logistic chain that level of seriousness propagates.
That fits my limited experience in that industry. A TV on the box certainly doesn't protect it against abuse.
When I was a teenager (around 1990 I think) I had a very short (surprisingly well-paying for a teenager) summer job unloading trucks at a warehouse. The first truck contained Atari monitors. One guy showed how it's done: remove the bottom box, and the rest comes tumbling after. Stack them on a pallet, race them through the warehouse on a forklift, take a tight turn so they all fall off again, etc.
My main takeaway was not to buy an Atari monitor that summer.
Just the other day a videotaped balcony delivery by a german Hermes driver went viral (he climbs the van throwing it from the street onto the 2nd floor balcony, successful on 3rd attempt). This has sparked the same discussions and Hermes now faces some really bad PR and is searching for the culprit.
I sometimes prepare my shipments as a kid preparing for bullies at school. Be ready for some abuse, everyone is tested. But don't look overly protected and don't just mark yourself fragile. That's "asking for it".
Back in the day, I used to work at General Electric in the warehouse unloading and re-building pallets of GE lightbulbs for 8 hours straight.
One of my coworkers there was this guy who liked to play ska music really loud. His buddy that he talked to used to be really violent with the boxes- chucking some of them hard on purpose, trying to get some of the product to break.
Similar story happened in school as ta, if a student did something bad or annoyed the TAs, they would Target the student and give a bad or zero grade on problems that can not give a back/white answer. This is usually on marking final exams because few students will review the marking and thus few if any consequences will happen.
I've observed something similar with suitcase handling at airports, where they are thrown around and piled up like it's typically done with bags of rice for example.
I used to work for a logistics firm and when one of the warehouse staff got called out for mishandling goods that was often the response.
The biggest issue there wasn't goods in transit, it was the actual packing process. Warehouse staff would pack mobile phones in to big plastic totes which would be taken to retail stores. They were on the clock so they would throw the phones in to the totes from wherever they were standing. Stores wouldn't accept phones in damaged boxes even if the contents were Okay.
The company fitted WiFi shock sensors to all the packing totes. All this did was increase the number of "fk you and fk your job" resignations.
I've often wondered about what you would discover if you were to send accelerometers through various channels, over various distances, and inside of various packages. A database of carrier/packaging/haul distance/acceleration history tuples would be a valuable B2B product for many manufacturers.
For very sensitive freight (read NMR magnets) they already fix tiltmeters and accelerometers to the shipping crate, together with instructions to note excursions on the bill of lading when the item arrives. The superconducting wire in a modern magnet is exceedingly brittle. The various postal services do that, too, I remember seeing a documentary about the Royal Mail.
The artist Walead Beshty used the hazards of the shipping system to create art. He would ship glass boxes through Fedex and the damaged result would become art.
This is a very neat idea. I wonder if transport companies already do this to their own packages as a form of auditing and optimizing their own services. Or if they do it to other companies as a comparison metric.
As a 3rd party, you would need large N data points to have actionable information. It might be that collecting the data points costs more than what they are worth.
That's basically what http://www.cargosense.com/services.html does. I remember Rich Kilmer presenting a beacon a couple years ago that does GPS/accelerometer/temperature/whatnot to monitor packages.
There are rumours that B&O did this with one of the boxes for their TVs. Supposedly it spiked when the box missing a slide in the Copenhagen sorting facility a feel 4 meter, hitting a concrete floor.
Boeing does this with their seats in the factory too, they put a picture of a Lamborghini on the seats since they cost the same.
EDIT: Yes, it's hard to believe a seat costs the same as a Lamborghini, that's exactly why they put the picture on it. This is mainly for the first class seats, though rows apparently cost about the same too.
I heard about also over 10 years ago, some airplane maintenance companys print things like cars and houses on spare parts, so people know about what they cost.
I've given up being able to receive certain items via mail where I live in NYC. Amazon only ships via UPS. They smashed two $300 humidifiers in a row by bouncing them around on their sides despite the box clearly labeled to only move while upright. I'm still waiting to get a refund on one of them weeks later. They managed to break both tripods I ordered as well. I kept the second as gluing the broken bit is easier than dealing with yet another return.
The effect of this trick will diminish quickly when everyone copies it. I wonder why this bike company was eager to reveal their trick if it was so effective. Perhaps the free advertisements they gets from news reports are more worthwhile?
This reminds me of a company "Atheist Shoes". That had to put just "Shoes" on their boxes because it greatly reduced delivery problems in US (no effect in europe).
I still don't understand why there has never been a push to hold carriers responsible for the goods they damage. Could you imagine dropping your car off to be repaired at your dealer/mechanic and being held responsible for anything they broke?
Manufacturers and retailers should push to hold UPS/FedEx/etc. responsible if damages are above a certain metric. (If they do already, it's clearly not good enough.) The 20% damage rate for this bike company is insane.
The king snake called, it wants its strategy back.
This is a clever trick, but like the king snake's mimicry of the venomous coral snake, the long term result will surely be reduced efficacy of the markings on the bonafide item.
Our hard drives for mainframes used to come with glass tube force exceeded indicators and ,'tipped in transit' markers. Five cent gizmos which meant you could refuse to accept or RMA.
-1 to bycicling.com for not linking to the vendor's website. It always bugs me when the best things about the web over print isn't used appropriately...
I had a large electrics/computer supplier tell me they would no longer sell my company TV's due to the fact that so many that were shipped in the southeast US arrived damaged and had to be returned. This is one of those think outside the box things that don't scale.
In the early days of Apple when they first started shipping computers to Japan they were getting transported in refrigerated trucks. The transport company saw the logo and just assumed it was fruit.
I’ve lost the source for this, I believe it was in the book “Apple Confidential 2.0”
Why not including an Arduino-logger with accelerometer, tilt-sensor and clock/timestamp. This way you could figure out where in the transport the rough handling is happening.
[+] [-] justinhensley|7 years ago|reply
I predict that a package being treated delicately throughout the entirety of it's route would be the outlier. Every package is at some point flung across a room/truck. The only question is if it is going to hit another box or a much harder surface.
this is all anecdotal, but seems to fit with the stat that roughly 10% of all packages in the United States are damaged during shipping.[0]
[0]: https://www.huffingtonpost.com/adriana-dunn/one-in-10-ecomme... -- couldn't find a direct link to the case study.
[+] [-] btrettel|7 years ago|reply
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 lane. This is a common problem: http://upshatescyclists.com/
If you call UPS or Fedex you'll often hear things like "This shouldn't happen." But the drivers are basically incentivized to break the law, regardless of "company policy". They don't have much time per package, so if blocking a bike lane saves them 10 seconds, they don't care if it is really dangerous for others.
Given this knowledge, I hypothesized that an effective way to make a delivery driver avoid the bike lane would be to slow them down if they park in the bike lane. I did once try to block a UPS driver from exiting their vehicle as a test. I recall that I said something like "You're blocking me, so I'm blocking you. You can park over there if you want a legal spot."
It wasn't the worst reaction I've seen from a UPS driver, but it was among the worst. Not recommended, but if enough cyclists did this then I suspect delivery drivers would start to avoid the bike lane.
[+] [-] metaphor|7 years ago|reply
A close friend who owns a UPS franchise warned me of this behavior and advised against placing any indication of fragility on the box. If I recall the threshold correctly, $1,000+ declared-value packages are identified and set aside in a separate group within the store. When a driver comes by to pick up daily packages, the store clerk alerts the driver of which, if any, have been declared and these are individually handled with the sort of care that a customer would generally expect. The regular drivers that service his store appear to take the high-value thing quite seriously, but I do wonder how far down the logistic chain that level of seriousness propagates.
[+] [-] mcv|7 years ago|reply
When I was a teenager (around 1990 I think) I had a very short (surprisingly well-paying for a teenager) summer job unloading trucks at a warehouse. The first truck contained Atari monitors. One guy showed how it's done: remove the bottom box, and the rest comes tumbling after. Stack them on a pallet, race them through the warehouse on a forklift, take a tight turn so they all fall off again, etc.
My main takeaway was not to buy an Atari monitor that summer.
[+] [-] jen729w|7 years ago|reply
Is it envy? “Screw this guy getting his fancy TV that I don’t have.” If not, what?
It seems needlessly cruel. I assume these are good people?
[+] [-] ce4|7 years ago|reply
https://youtu.be/r4adBQf7R0Q
[+] [-] arketyp|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lphnull|7 years ago|reply
One of my coworkers there was this guy who liked to play ska music really loud. His buddy that he talked to used to be really violent with the boxes- chucking some of them hard on purpose, trying to get some of the product to break.
[+] [-] coygui|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] misev|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DoubleGlazing|7 years ago|reply
I used to work for a logistics firm and when one of the warehouse staff got called out for mishandling goods that was often the response.
The biggest issue there wasn't goods in transit, it was the actual packing process. Warehouse staff would pack mobile phones in to big plastic totes which would be taken to retail stores. They were on the clock so they would throw the phones in to the totes from wherever they were standing. Stores wouldn't accept phones in damaged boxes even if the contents were Okay.
The company fitted WiFi shock sensors to all the packing totes. All this did was increase the number of "fk you and fk your job" resignations.
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] whatshisface|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mrsuprawsm|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] HarryHirsch|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hx2a|7 years ago|reply
https://www.artsy.net/artwork/walead-beshty-fedex-large-kraf...
[+] [-] tyingq|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] twic|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anonytrary|7 years ago|reply
As a 3rd party, you would need large N data points to have actionable information. It might be that collecting the data points costs more than what they are worth.
[+] [-] hlidotbe|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] floatingatoll|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mrweasel|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _visgean|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] harshulpandav|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xorgar831|7 years ago|reply
EDIT: Yes, it's hard to believe a seat costs the same as a Lamborghini, that's exactly why they put the picture on it. This is mainly for the first class seats, though rows apparently cost about the same too.
[+] [-] switch007|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _trampeltier|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JohnTHaller|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] The_suffocated|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MRD85|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Fiaxhs|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] scotty79|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TheKarateKid|7 years ago|reply
Manufacturers and retailers should push to hold UPS/FedEx/etc. responsible if damages are above a certain metric. (If they do already, it's clearly not good enough.) The 20% damage rate for this bike company is insane.
[+] [-] magnetic|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ryandvm|7 years ago|reply
This is a clever trick, but like the king snake's mimicry of the venomous coral snake, the long term result will surely be reduced efficacy of the markings on the bonafide item.
[+] [-] avip|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ggm|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Scoundreller|7 years ago|reply
It still worked fine.
[+] [-] donarb|7 years ago|reply
https://www.labelmaster.com/shop/shipping/damage-indicators/...
[+] [-] Havoc|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tracker1|7 years ago|reply
https://www.vanmoof.com/en_us/
[+] [-] basicplus2|7 years ago|reply
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12572465
[+] [-] chisleu|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] flurdy|7 years ago|reply
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2018/12/29/i-ordered...
[+] [-] citizenpaul|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] spongeb00b|7 years ago|reply
I’ve lost the source for this, I believe it was in the book “Apple Confidential 2.0”
[+] [-] punnerud|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Causality1|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
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