Used to deliver for Amazon. Fragile, handle with care, this side up, lay flat, team lift, don’t stack, all those mean nothing to the warehouse workers or most of the drivers. It’s so chaotic in there and nobody has time to treat packages carefully.
Just want to shift the blame here: that culture is set by management. The likelihood of damaging any given item to the extent that a claim is made is low enough that throughput is prioritized for profit. It’s a shitty statistics game and your “fragile this side up” means nothing.
I threw boxes for FedEx for a while at an airport. And yeah, “nonconveyable” freight (oversize/oddly shaped/overweight/hazmat) gets handled differently and holy shit is it a nightmare simply because its isn’t easily stackable. Overweight? Yeah, we just tipped that out of the can and let it fall so we could roll it onto the low belt and into the next can. Over/oddly sized? If you’re lucky it got set aside and shoved on top. If not, it got crushed by whatever got thrown on top.
And sidenote: that box looks great, especially if it went through more than one ramp sort.
I have seen boxes with ‘Open carefully, do not use a knife’ on the outer box when there was another set of cardboard boxes inside protecting the product. Oh yeah, real glad I didn’t cut the tape with my blade that’s not long enough to fully cut even one layer of cardboard.
I have also seen a label “delicate product, fold carefully” on fucking denim jackets.
When everything is ‘fragile’ nothing is. If you won’t pay for a packaging engineer then pay for actual special handling.
Used to deliver for Amazon. Fragile, handle with care, this side up, lay flat, team lift, don’t stack, all those mean nothing to the warehouse workers or most of the drivers. It’s so chaotic in there and nobody has time to treat packages carefully.
This has been the case for decades, everywhere.
People, package your shit properly or pay the extra amount to ship it specially.
Yepp. I work in shipping, and if you’re not comfortable throwing the box as hard as you can at a wall, you shouldn’t be comfortable shipping it.
Just want to shift the blame here: that culture is set by management. The likelihood of damaging any given item to the extent that a claim is made is low enough that throughput is prioritized for profit. It’s a shitty statistics game and your “fragile this side up” means nothing.
I threw boxes for FedEx for a while at an airport. And yeah, “nonconveyable” freight (oversize/oddly shaped/overweight/hazmat) gets handled differently and holy shit is it a nightmare simply because its isn’t easily stackable. Overweight? Yeah, we just tipped that out of the can and let it fall so we could roll it onto the low belt and into the next can. Over/oddly sized? If you’re lucky it got set aside and shoved on top. If not, it got crushed by whatever got thrown on top.
And sidenote: that box looks great, especially if it went through more than one ramp sort.
What did you do with stuff labeled hazmat?
That all got shifted with the non-conveyables (noncons). You’d have to be “certified” to put it in a can.
We tried not to spill the vats of bull semen and human tissue, but both happened at least once.
Think how much it sucks for the guy who planned his whole weekend around that package of bull semen that never arrived.
“Should’ve known it was too good to be true…”
In part because a large fraction are bullshit.
I have seen boxes with ‘Open carefully, do not use a knife’ on the outer box when there was another set of cardboard boxes inside protecting the product. Oh yeah, real glad I didn’t cut the tape with my blade that’s not long enough to fully cut even one layer of cardboard.
I have also seen a label “delicate product, fold carefully” on fucking denim jackets.
When everything is ‘fragile’ nothing is. If you won’t pay for a packaging engineer then pay for actual special handling.