I don’t do it often so it’s easy to forget there’s a rule.
I will knock it off FNO.
[QUOTE=brickbacon]
I think all of you missed the point I was making. I was trying to give some people insight as to why they see delivery men treat their packages like shit. I know it’s wrong, they know it’s wrong, but handling the boxes the way they should be handled takes too much time and energy. Especially when it’s 95 degrees outside and you want to go home.
[QUOTE]
Oh no, I got your point. And you just re-enforced it. Basically, it’s that your an ass. Got it.
That seems like a no-brainer, but if it is there are a lot of people with no brains. For instance, at GPX I saw a lot of boxes filled with clothes collapse under their own weight because the box had originally been designed to be the cheapest and lightest way to package cartons of laundry detergent, so they replaced a bunch of lightweight products in cartons that helped support the box with as many heavy, amorphous blobs as they could pack in it. Then tied it up with kite string. Cheap cotton kite string, not the strong nylon stuff. I felt sad when, even if I gave it the kid glove treatment, seams would split as I lifted it.
People, six sides of corrogated cardboard are not all that you need for a good package. Think about the box you will grab from behind the grocery store. Wine and liquor cases are a good bet because they are intended to protect glass. They are also a good size; it may cost more to ship two 25 pound boxes of clothes than one 50 pound box but nobody will be picking through your dirty undies at the freight depot. You will also save money shipping CLEAN clothes because they weigh less. Patch the hole on the bottom of most boxes with cardboard so your socks can’t escape. Wrap fragile stuff in bubblewrap then pack the box tightly (so the fragile stuff can’t shift or unwrap itself) with more bubblewrap or with packing peanuts. Tape the box thoroughly; I believe there is a point where a box can have too much tape around it but I’ve never seen it.
In other words, pack your stuff knowing there are brickbacons out there ready to play David Beckham with it.
Bonus luggage tip: That plastic Samsonite luggage is butt ugly but the latches nearly always hold no matter how many tons of clothes are crammed in them (with the advantage of going from “nearly bulletproof” when empty to “capable of stopping an RPG” when packed) and I have never seen an American Tourister bag with a broken latch.
So how much would it cost to provide kid glove service? How much does it cost to pack it really well? What if you want to transport something that’s irreplacable? Museum pieces of your mothers ashes or the like? Is there a company that provides premium services for your packages?
There are several companies. In general they are “freight forwarding” companies who work with the major common carriers to select the appropriate levels of service and carrier for each leg of the journey. If UPS has a higher damaged packages percentage from point A to B in a journey of A - X then they use someone else for A-B. They have it hop carriers or levels of service(air, express, ground, etc.) based on a history of how those carriers perform on a specific leg of a journey. So they’re kind of parcel sheperds.
Rock-It Cargo “specialize[s] in handling complex itineraries, international destinations, fragile cargo and time-critical schedules - all with the highest degree of critical planning, execution, and customer-focused service.” They have shipped dinosaur bones according to their website. They’re more of a large-scale organization. If you’ve got a rock show you need to ship dozens of instruments, hundreds of lights, stage frameworks, sound equipment, etc. and be reasonably confident they will all be there on time and undamaged then they’re the best in the biz.
Smaller scale, heirloom furniture and stuff, is often handled by companies with expertise in packing and selecting carriers versus people who track it all the way through the process and matrix carriers during a trip. Specialty Shipping and Services “Domestic or International Freight Specializing in Fragile, Oversized, Hard to Ship Artwork, Antiques & Electronics. We can pack and ship anything from an antique pinball machine to your Grandma’s crystal and china.”
Enjoy,
Steven
Dropping them is contractually obligated, but jumping on them is dedication to the job. 
Hey, whiny douchebags - you know who you are - brickbacon was honest enough to clue you in to what really goes on behind closed doors. You oozing lesions of bubbling pus take this as a license to attack him.
Fuckwads, this kind of shit goes on every day in most every US industry. Read Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential and think twice as you enjoy that fine meal at that nice restaurant.
You guys would really get your knickers in a twist if you knew what went on with baggage handlers and your luggage at airports.
Should employees be conscientious and do their jobs to the best of their abilities? You betcha. Will they do this in the absence of proper supervision, motivation, and training? Hell no. Does management know what really goes on in that warehouse? Absofuckinglutely, unless they’re complete idiots.
“brickbacon should be fired. Waaa! We pay your salary. Waaa!”
You silly fucking pollyfuckingannas.
Bullshit.
I worked in warehousing and S/R for ten years. There are no “meaningless related tasks,” there’s a job to do, and a (usually) optimally efficient and effective way of doing it. I have never seen anyone maliciously damage a package for therapeutic purposes, although you can bet your ass that such behaviour would be as “liberating” as it gets, and anyone who did that would find themselves with the absolute freedom to watch daytime TV before they had a chance to blink.
Yeah, it’s hard, and you have to work to a schedule. Packages aren’t daintily placed on the skid – but they aren’t thrown ten feet or deliberately damaged, either. If brickbacon thinks those are normal or acceptable work practices, I wouldn’t want to bet that he’s going to collect much more than the two paycheques he’s received so far.
Other people have commented on the routine stresses that packages receive without being met with any criticism – because they’re accurate reflections of the realities of shipping. Packages are moved quickly and often dropped a few inches in the hustle of loading and unloading. Mechanical conveyances knock them around a bit. Pack accordingly or don’t be surprised if your goods arrive in pieces.
It’s another thing altogether to say that shippers, apart from not caring if packages are damaged, willfully break stuff to get their jollies because the work is hard and often thankless. That’s fucking an outrageous and extremely dubious claim.
Then again, maybe not, what with how most nurses punch incoming patients in the stomach to relieve stress.
Hey, moron, no-one’s saying that packages should be handled with kid gloves. And everyone concedes that a certain amount of rough treatment and even breakage is inevitable in the industry.
But if you’d pull your head out of your ass for about five seconds, you would have understood that what people were angry about was brickbacon’s assertion about “how liberating it is kicking the shit out of a box,” and his declaration that “it feels good to kick one really hard to see if it breaks.” This is the sort of wanton, deliberate destruction that people are justifiably angry about.
Also, the fact that such behind-the-scenes bullshit goes on in a variety of industries doesn’t make it right. And just because it goes on in some places doesn’t mean it happens everywhere. I worked in bars and restaurants for years before and during my college degree, and i never once took out my frustrations on the customers by spitting in their food or doing some other piece of petty vandalism.
My old boss once worked in the company’s “new electronics outbound order shipping warehouse”.
Before he let the company begin using a packaging policy, he test it by taking the product to the second story ledge at the warehouse and dropping the box.
If the product still passed QA, the boxing standard would be adopted. Otherwise, they increased the foam quantity, etc
Not every day I can get somebody to answer to “whiny douchebag”. 
It’s unrealistic in the extreme to expect employees at any pay rate to do their jobs properly without supervision, motivation and training. Management knows what’s going on in that warehouse, and they tolerate it, for whatever reason. Or maybe they really are completely fucking clueless.
Hearing about a warehouseman beating the hell out of a package may offend your sensibilities, but it goes on all the time. Making sure that it doesn’t happen is part of management’s job.
As a practical matter, it’s the outright theft and fraud that really cost money in the shipping and warehousing businesses. It’s not the odd piece that gets busted up, intentionally or accidentally, that’s the major problem. The major problem is the stuff that just disappears off the truck or out of the warehouse.
Sure there are meaningless related tasks. I’m sure it’s not the same everywhere, but many of the major shipping companies require us to do a bunch of shit that is redundant and unnecessary. You may have never seen people maliciously damage packages, but I have. I’ve seen delivery men do it in my normal life. This is not breaking news. Of course they don’t come out and say it’s for therapeutic purposes, but you can usually tell when someone does something out of frustration and anger.
You act as if I’m some rogue agent. I have not done anything I haven’t seen many other people do. I’ve seen some of my bosses throw packages. That’s apparently the way the system works. The delivery man the OP mentioned wasn’t an anomaly.
Really? How do you explain the behavior that many people commenting in this thread are seeing? I don’t know what you find dubious about the truth, but I can state that I have seen this with my own eyes many times.
I guess you’ve never been to an old folk’s home. Elder neglect is very widespread. It is certainly due to many of the same reasons people kick boxes. To quote the article:
I’m sure you also know that medical errors, including those by doctors, kill between 44,000 and 98,000 people each year. I’m sure plenty of those deaths are due to the same systematic problems that plague the shipping industry.
You’re absolutely right on this point, but do you disagree that the warehouseman, paid to do a certain job, has a responsibility to refrain from acts that are contradictory to the spirit of his job? Frustration with working conditions and using the excuse ‘I’m only human’ do not absolve anybody of ethical failings. It sounds like someone doing something wrong to someone they’ll never meet because the first someone is unhappy with the way their day is going.
I’ve felt like doing that wrong myself, from time to time. I’ve even done that wrong, more than once. That never made me right, nor was my action ever justified. Every time it happens, it’s a selfish and childish act. Striving to do better is one of the goals I have set for myself.
Can you offer an example? Nothing is redundant or unnecessary – it’s not cost-effective. You may feel that it’s unnecessary for all concerned parties to keep track of a shipment, but the customer doesn’t, I promise.
I’ve had somewhere in the neighborhood of 130 times more experience in shipping than you have. I’ve done every job from swamper to dispatch manager. Elsewhere, I’ve worked as a purchaser and dealt with a number of shipping companies from the point-of-view of a primary customer. You are saying that it is commonplace (even standard) for people to deliberately damage packages, which is ridiculous on the face of it. While some policies do result in accidental damage for the gain of overall efficiency, damages are carefully monitored and things are adjusted at every step to keep them optimally minimal, without sacrificing overall efficiency. It would be an extremely rare and sloppy operation that didn’t review individual workers’ and departmental damages on a weekly basis, and make HR and procedural changes based on that data. The system corrects for people who are unacceptably careless. Someone seen willfully destroying packages ought to, (and in just about any company, will,) be summarily dismissed. If a company accepts widespread sabotage rather than manage their labour or pay more for better labour conditions, the market will quickly decide that it belongs in the dustbin of commerce.
Yes, packages get chucked around in the normal course of operations, and some are damaged this way. That’s not willful damage. Part of the responsibility for ensuring a package arrives intact lies with the originating shipper. If you drop some delicate object in a regular 40# FedEx box with a bit of easter grass around it, and it arrives in itty bitty pieces, it’s your own damned fault. People chuck packages around (within reason) because they’re assumed to be packaged for shipment, and the job has to be done as quickly as possible.
Yes, he was. And unless his witnessed action was an anomaly, he’ll be out of a job soon.
Of course there is plenty of inadequate care due to cut-cornered staffing, (paricularly in private elder-care facilities,) but this is not the same thing as deliberately assaulting a patient because you don’t like your job.
I agree that the acts that brickbacon and others have talked about are selfish and childish. What I’m skeptical about is the moral outrage. These things go on and always have. Unless mangagement is willing and able to step in with clear standards, periodic inspections, appropriate sanctions, comparable rewards, etc., the workers will continue to do as they’ve always done.
The question of ethical obligation is a lot trickier, because the employer in all likelihood is a large corporation. Large corporations typically operate on the “if it’s profitable but not illegal, we’ll do it” ethical model. Being a hard, conscientious worker is my personal ideal, but I’m realistic enough to recognize that this may or may not help me keep my corporate gig. Sometimes you go further by being a get-along guy, doing whatever everyone else is doing, even if that includes malicious destruction of property. Being a stickler for proper procedure and workplace ethics may actually work against you. All depends.
I believe that management is perfectly aware of what goes on in the aforementioned warehouse, and they allow it to go on based on a cost/benefit analysis or maybe even to get ammunition against workers in case they need to fire them for some reason.
You had a smart boss. My husband has worked for two shipping companies (technical support and customer service). The first day of orientation was a video of the mechanical sorting of packages at hubs. It is not a gentle process.
When clients asked how they should package their goods for shipping, they were told to imagine they could hold the item over their head and then drop it on concrete. If you don’t think your package can withstand that treatment, it’s either not properly packaged or can’t be shipped.
Of course, none of that justifies intentionally abusing packages.
You are making a lot of assumptions here about what I find unnecessary. Without giving too much information about exactly what I do, and where I work, we ship many packages internally that contain multiple stickers with he same information. That, in addition to a few other things that are repetitive.
Show me where I said it is commonplace for people to deliberately damage packages. I specifically said:
As I’m sure there are life long lawyers that will say they have never seen their peers overcharge their clients, there are people like you who are blind to the realities of shipping merchandise. There are been dozens of news reports showing baggage handlers throwing around bags, delivery men chucking packages, etc. I don’t need to validate my beliefs with anecdotal evidence. I knew this happened long before I worked at a warehouse. Seeing more often, and the complete lack of concern on the part of some workers, was my only surprise.
No, but it is a manifestation of frustration as a result of an excessive workload. My point was not that that all people under such circumstances will act out physically, just that they will cut corners, break rules/polices, and not do their jobs properly.
That would be here. in your first post:
In ten years, I know of one guy who deliberately damaged a package. He was throwing a tantrum over a disciplinary action (for being drunk on the job and missing too much work) and was immediately fired. The idea that it is anywhere near normal for people to break things for the sheer hell of it (or to vent) is ludicrous.
“Blind to the realities of shipping merchandise?” Congratulations, you’ve spiked my irony meter. Listen, I’ve been the guy who assembled the palettes and loaded 'em on the trucks. I’ve been the guy who hustles stuff out of the trucks along the route. I’ve been the guy who uses a stopwatch to determine what the absolute minimum amount of time a task can be accomplished in, and holds everyone to that standard. I’ve been the guy who collates the damage reports and determines who can’t work at speed without fucking things up and needs to get the axe. I’ve been the logistics guy who sets the system up to move as much as possible in the shortest amount of time. I’ve been the customer who screams bloody murder because a shipper failed to get my product on a truck in an appropriately timely manner, and threatens to take tens of thousands of dollars of annual business to a competitor if things don’t tick along just so.
I know a damn sight more about the realities of shipping than you do. Yes, there is tremendous pressure to work at the absolute threshold of human abilility to move things damned fast. Yes, this sometimes results in damages that would not occur if workers were allowed to set their own pace – but there’s a risks/benefits analysis. If damage rates go up too much, we lose business. If delivery time goes up too much, we lose business.
Workers who commit deliberate sabotage account for a practically insignificant amount of damage. The pragmatic pressure to minimize damage as a job-security measure tends to discourage it. I have a hard time believing that other employees would observe sabotage and keep quiet about it, because when it’s their ass too, the knives come out.
Yes, and there are just as many reports of shark attacks. That doesn’t mean that sharks flock to the beaches to fill up on manflesh. If it was in any way commonplace, it wouldn’t be newsworthy.
Just like the…NAZIS!!!
Larry, you’ve working in the industry and have a great deal of experience, but you most likely haven’t worked at brickbacon’s particular warehouse. He says it goes on in his warehouse; I don’t really see how you can dispute that.