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Reminds me of an apocryphal story about a packaging line in a cereal factory. They created a complicated weighing system to make sure no box was packed empty be

Reminds me of an apocryphal story about a packaging line in a cereal factory. They created a complicated weighing system to make sure no box was packed empty because of a cereal bag accidentally falling out....only to realize the line workers had already solved the problem by placing a pedestal fan that blew away the light empty boxes as the went on the line.

Mountain_Skies 4y ago
Though this was back in the 90s and things might have changed since then, when I stocked the cereal aisle, Kellogg's had somewhere in the range of 0.5% to 1% empty boxes. Really weird the first time you pull one out of the shipping box to find the individual box fully sealed but empty.
bluedino 4y ago
Right after high school I worked at one of the big office furniture companies (you've sat in one of their chairs/cubes if you've worked in an office job). At some point, a couple hundred batches of $1200 chairs went out with one of the legs cast wrong. The easy thing to do was to have a piece of the packaging stuffed in the leg during assembly. The problem was, the service techs never knew about this, so when they'd go out and warranty a caster, they'd find a bunch of cardboard or whatever jammed in the leg, put the caster back on without replacing the cardboard, and the chair wouldn't be level. So, they would come back out next week with a new leg.
- cjrp 4y ago
  Wait.. so the cardboard was structural?
  - brewdad 4y ago
    It sounds like the equivalent of placing a bunch of napkins under the foot of your restaurant table to keep it from wobbling except the napkins were inside the table rather than on the floor. Pretty amazing hack. :)
Retric 4y ago
If I recall the story continues where the complex system included a sensor to detect an empty box. Realizing the fan worked they disabled the complex system until one day the fan quietly failed without anyone noticing and empty boxes where sent out. This created a great deal of embarrassment for everyone involved. Even more time and effort was spent after the problem was already ‘fixed’ twice at which point they used both the fan and the more complex system.
russdill 4y ago
This seems a bit unlikely given that air has long been very widely used in production lines to remove objects that are too light. But it makes a neat story.

Mountain_Skies 4y ago

Though this was back in the 90s and things might have changed since then, when I stocked the cereal aisle, Kellogg's had somewhere in the range of 0.5% to 1% empty boxes. Really weird the first time you pull one out of the shipping box to find the individual box fully sealed but empty.

bluedino 4y ago

Right after high school I worked at one of the big office furniture companies (you've sat in one of their chairs/cubes if you've worked in an office job). At some point, a couple hundred batches of $1200 chairs went out with one of the legs cast wrong. The easy thing to do was to have a piece of the packaging stuffed in the leg during assembly. The problem was, the service techs never knew about this, so when they'd go out and warranty a caster, they'd find a bunch of cardboard or whatever jammed in the leg, put the caster back on without replacing the cardboard, and the chair wouldn't be level. So, they would come back out next week with a new leg.

cjrp 4y ago
Wait.. so the cardboard was structural?
- brewdad 4y ago
  It sounds like the equivalent of placing a bunch of napkins under the foot of your restaurant table to keep it from wobbling except the napkins were inside the table rather than on the floor. Pretty amazing hack. :)

Retric 4y ago

If I recall the story continues where the complex system included a sensor to detect an empty box. Realizing the fan worked they disabled the complex system until one day the fan quietly failed without anyone noticing and empty boxes where sent out. This created a great deal of embarrassment for everyone involved. Even more time and effort was spent after the problem was already ‘fixed’ twice at which point they used both the fan and the more complex system.

russdill 4y ago

This seems a bit unlikely given that air has long been very widely used in production lines to remove objects that are too light. But it makes a neat story.