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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 pack
by justinhensley 8y ago
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]
[0]: https://www.huffingtonpost.com/adriana-dunn/one-in-10-ecommerce-packa_b_4371992.html https://www.huffingtonpost.com/adriana-dunn/one-in-10-ecomme... -- couldn't find a direct link to the case study.
- coygui 8y agoSimilar 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.
- wanderfowl 8y agoMuch like UPS targeting boxes, this is 100% not OK, and as a professor, if I found out my TAs were doing this, they would quickly find themselves someplace between "disciplined" and "fired".
- matz1 8y agoRight，If you can found it.
- coygui 8y agoI assume you are a responsible professor. From my experience, most professors if not every only cares about their research. Teaching is like a job not giving them any positive feedback, so why they care? And TA-ship is usually paid by school meaning no professor can fire TAs.
- wanderfowl 8y agoThis is sadly common, but I'd like to assure you there are many of us who are interested in pedagogy, and measure our long-term success on the success and learning of our students.
- stordoff 8y agoAre they not anonymous? You might be able to recognise it by the work, but at my university, marking was done by people sufficiently far from teaching individual students to ensure that is not the case.
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- jen729w 8y agoYou know these people, so do you have any insight as to why they did this? 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?
- kakarot 8y agoRedirecting frustration over 20th-century working conditions, now doubt.
- andai 8y agoI work as a postman. People don't really send letters any more, so a large and increasing percentage is packages. Many (most?) of my coworkers hate their jobs, and their lives, and are deliberately rough with packages, especially if they look expensive.
- mevile 8y ago"I'm unhappy with my life so I'm going to make other people unhappy too." How about these people do something with their incredibly valuable short lives other than being miserable? Unless you're in chronic pain of some kind, being alive is a gift. It's a treasure. Every moment is precious.
- ohithereyou 8y agoI'd rather have my packages broken than my local carrier going postal. I can always get a replacement from the company if my package is busted up.
- metaphor 8y ago> 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.
- gumby 8y agoYou pay a premium for that high value declaration which means what you are really paying is a premium to have your package not kicked. This is like the airlines who have unbundled seat size and the right to bring a carry-on.
- metaphor 8y agoIn complete agreement. I was fortunate enough to a have friend who waived those costs for me. The takeway is that, anecdotally, the UPS $1,000 threshold appears to genuinely change behavior; anything less is pragmatically just another package subject to careless/willful transport abuse.
- pofilat 8y agoSounds rough, but it fair. You can package your item properly to be safe it the world (costs time and money, depending on fragility), or pay for gentle handling. Similar to how you can carry your own umbrella in the rain, or pay someone to carry an umbrella for you. I don't want to pay an extra $10 for every shipment.
- kevindong 8y agoLast I checked UPS Ground charges $0.90 per $100 of declared value (first $100 is included for free) (FedEx Ground is $1 per $100; first $100 is also included for free).
- mcv 8y agoThat 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.
- btrettel 8y agoThis 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/ 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.
- kenneth 8y agoHow do you block a UPS driver from getting out of his truck with just a bicycle?
- btrettel 8y agoI stood directly in front of the side door with my bike in front of me, leaving perhaps a 1 or 2 foot gap between my bike and the delivery vehicle. I only blocked their typical exit, i.e., the exit bordering the sidewalk. The driver could have walked into traffic. They expect me to go into traffic, so it seems only fair for them to have to exit that way. Funny thing was that the driver seemed uninterested in exiting that way... As I recall the driver went through the small gap I left, though not without getting fairly irritated.
- reaperducer 8y agothe 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.
- misev 8y agoI'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.
- Stratoscope 8y agoThe odd thing about this is that it can be much more work to handle things roughly. One time I was waiting for a flight and watching the activity out the window, and the guy who was transferring bags from the little truck-train onto the ramp that slides them up into the airliner was throwing each bag into the air and onto the ramp. It was clear that it would have taken much less effort to just set each bag onto the ramp - wouldn't even have to be gentle, just don't go the extra effort of throwing them in the air. But I guess treating them gently wouldn't have offered the same satisfaction.
- SamReidHughes 8y agoTreating the bags gently takes more time and effort. For starters you don't know heavy the bag is, so first you have to figure that out, and you have to spend effort managing its downward trajectory. It's more wear on the joints and body to handle it carefully than to just throw each bag with good form. I don't know what I'm talking about, so treat that with a grain of salt, but it's plausible.
- Moru 8y agoIt's the other way around, less wear if you are careful. Tossing around puts more strain on your joints.
- grogenaut 8y agoMy favorite from checking guns a few times is that I notice that the only thing they don't toss is the guns (which are obvious because they're marked and padlocked unlike anything else). Guns are set aside, loaded last, unloaded first, and moved carefully. Everything else, tossed.
- arketyp 8y agoI 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".
- lphnull 8y agoBack 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.
- ce4 8y agoJust 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. https://youtu.be/r4adBQf7R0Q https://youtu.be/r4adBQf7R0Q
- DoubleGlazing 8y ago"You don't pay me enough to care" 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.