Is the world mad

[Simplicity]

I've just got home from a weekend away.
And was eagerly awaiting to open the package that I knew was waiting.
Due to a tex alert and email on my phone.
I've just brought my self a lovely bit of 01 tool steel precision ground 10 mm by 36 inches long.
For future projects ie may sit in the shed for 3456 days.Or be used next week not sure which way it will go.
But what is surprising the packaging, now I appreciate it's a lump of steel.
And I appreciate it was packaged correctly.
What I can not understand is the size of the packaging this piece of steel is only the length of grown mans arm.
Not an elephant trunk.
I am seriously considering giving up on humanity!!!
https://uploads.tapatalk-cdn.com/20170806/2dd9e3b79b8b5002d62ba1c8ac502bda.jpghttps://uploads.tapatalk-cdn.com/20170806/b63ecc4a363bfac3f29b0eff88d59c00.jpg
What a complete waste of resources.
Rant over


Cheers Matt

[DomAU]

Yeah what a joke. The rod should have been taped to a thick plank of hardwood, wrapped in bubble wrap and in a box at least twice that size. When will they learn?!! :D

[clear out]

At least DHL didn't drop it off the plane.
They did that to a rather delicate exhibition piece that had successfully done 8 trips to different venues in the states.
When it arrived back here in Oz they obviously just threw it off the plane.
H.

[NCArcher]

Standard size box. The next one down was 1cm too short

[rob streeper]

You should've seen the box my 9' long track for my tracksaw came in.

[tony_A]

It turned up undamaged and that is something to be thankful for. The courier industry seems to have a no care and no responsibility attitude when it comes to handling freight. I wouldn't like to be sending freight regularly as the damages must be significant. One supplier I dealt with recently had 5 electric motors damaged in one month. That kind of attitude necessitates using packaging that can withstand being dropped from great height and having sharp things poked into it. Although, no doubt, their breakages department will come up with other ways of damaging goods in transit. (rant over)

[Chris Parks]

When employees are handling thousands of parcels per shift or machines sort and automatically drop parcels into a cage fragile does not exist. I don't know any company that does a dedicated fragile service and if they did no one would pay for it. I wish I had taken a video of manual parcel sorting to show you guys.

[BobL]

Back in 2008? I purchased 7.5kg of tool steel from the US as part of a group buy.
The Steel consisted mainly of 50 and 100 mm wide by 900 mm long O1 flat bar of varying thickness.
It arrived in a tough USPS canvas mail bag, along with the shredded remains of the box, and newspaper and oiled paper packaging material.
It appears that the packaging disintegrated somewhere in the US but someone kindly put it all into the postal bag.
The steel was slightly scratched but as it was oiled it was not rusty at all.
The canvas bag says "property of the US Postal Service" - it's very useful as a camping tote bag as it has a drawstring with a lockable clip on it.

[Fuzzie]

A while a ago, a friend used to have a subscription to an American computer magazine. The mag company (and US postal service) used to batch up a number of copies destined for Australia in plastic wrap with a big sticker on the outside that said for the Aus postal service to unparcel in the local sorting center. Usually however, because his mag was on top he would collect 10 issues a month.

[dubrosa22]

Around 2007/8 I ordered a paperback from a small boutique publisher in NYC. After three or four months I'd about given up on it ever arriving when the parcelman knocked on the door. Slung over his shoulder like Santa's sack was an enormous nylon fabric USPS mailbag. Inside the bag was a box. In the box was about a cubic metre of styofoam peanuts. Then a satchel. Then bubblewrap. Then finally the paperback.
I think I'd only paid about $10 bucks for post!

Yep, BobL the USPS sack is indeed great for camping! :)

V

[Simplicity]

So from reading all the great replies. One can only assume the world has been mad for quite sometime.
Do the relative authorities know about this !!!!

Cheers Matt


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[rrich]

I was talking to a manufacturer of a digital readout for table saws.

They were shipping the track inside a piece of vinyl sewer pipe, well padded and with caps at each end. They were having an extraordinary damage in shipping rate, like 65%.

UPS investigated and found that the packaging was excellent and that the cause of the problem was that most of the doors in UPS facilities were about 20 CM narrower than the sewer pipe was long. So throw the sewer pipe on the fork lift and full speed ahead to load it onto the delivery truck.

Sort of like, "They pay me to drive a fork lift, they don't pay me to think."

[Bushmiller]

Matt

That is an impressive piece of material. You wouldn't want it to break now would you?

Regards
Paul

[NCArcher]

One can only assume the world has been mad for quite sometime.
Do the relative authorities know about this !!!!

Cheers Matt

They're the one perpetuating this madness.

[richmond68]

When employees are handling thousands of parcels per shift or machines sort and automatically drop parcels into a cage fragile does not exist. I don't know any company that does a dedicated fragile service and if they did no one would pay for it. I wish I had taken a video of manual parcel sorting to show you guys.
I don't know about where you are Chris, but there's a COPE depot a couple of minutes away from me, and COPE are the biggest specialist sensitive freight operator in Australia. International shipping might be a challenge, but I'd have no qualms about sending fragile items within Australia with them having seen the local branch repacking items they thought weren't sufficiently protected. They seem to do good business.

[Chris Parks]

I don't know about where you are Chris, but there's a COPE depot a couple of minutes away from me, and COPE are the biggest specialist sensitive freight operator in Australia. International shipping might be a challenge, but I'd have no qualms about sending fragile items within Australia with them having seen the local branch repacking items they thought weren't sufficiently protected. They seem to do good business.

Price a 90kg parcel Sydney to Perth and let me know how much. This sort of stuff was my job and at one time an income when I sold stuff and I saw exactly what was happening because I was doing it. COPE will send it on its way but if you are sending a parcel to a remote area it will get handed off to the likes of AP or TNT etc and they do not have a fragile service. AP are in the end the only company that delivers to every address in Oz, the others might say they do but in the end it is handed to AP for the absolute remote deliveries.

[Bohdan]

AP are in the end the only company that delivers to every address in Oz, the others might say they do but in the end it is handed to AP for the absolute remote deliveries.

I'm not that remote (10k out of town, 30k out of Geelong) but can't get a delivery from AP, I have to go and get my post from the Post office in town.

I do get deliveries from the couriers where one local driver covers several companies.

[richmond68]

Price a 90kg parcel Sydney to Perth and let me know how much. This sort of stuff was my job and at one time an income when I sold stuff and I saw exactly what was happening because I was doing it. COPE will send it on its way but if you are sending a parcel to a remote area it will get handed off to the likes of AP or TNT etc.
Ah, the good old I know better than you response with a redirection. No need to be so reactionary Chris, I was just providing an example of a freight company that do exactly what you said isn't done or that people would pay for. We all say things and get contradicted on them. How we handle that says more about us than our original comment does.

I do some relief driving for a relatives freight business, so I've seen plenty of times how freight is handled, dropped, kicked, forked and worse, even seen storemen playing a game of football with a small parcel wrapped in fragile tape which they thought was hilarious. I can understand why firms overpack items. But I've also had some laughable packing, and some auto parts have zero packaging. But the standout consignments for me were a stick broken off a tree with a con note attached, an empty box and last but not least an esky. The stick was the result of a boring day in the auto parts warehouse and an inside joke; the empty carton was because they needed a part from a branch office who didn't have a carton to pack the item in, so they sent them an empty box via courier to then return. The esky, well that was like being a blood courier except the contents contained a different bodily fluid from some of the nation's finest stallions going to the university for analysis. Now that was fragile freight. I used to tape the lid on.

[tonzeyd]

I wouldn't say the world has gone mad, as i've had both good and bad packaging. The most logical scenario I would imagine is the company in the past probably have had their fair share of stuff being received by customers where because of a lack of packaging was bent etc. As such over packging is the most cost effective method of ensuring this doesn't happen.

[Handyjack]

I used to work for someone who to keep cost down did everything possible so they did not need to pay for packaging. They obtained used packaging from various shops so they could pack their goods for shipping. It eventually happened, a parcel they sent ended up where the packaging came from, not where it was meant to go. An employee had to go there and collect the whole lot for re packing and re posting.

[Simplicity]

It was rumoured that.
Henry Ford,
Ordered all his engines be delivered in a certain wooden box in a certain style.
Said Wooden box then became the seating.


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[richmond68]

Those rumours about Ford have been around longer than I've been alive, but there's no documented proof for them. A bit of romanticism perhaps, it would have to relate to the period the Dodge Bros supplied components to Ford but without proof who can say it happened? What might be closer to the truth was that Ford were operating a wood distillation plant that produced charcoal, acetic acid etc from wood waste that was a revenue stream in its own right.

[richmond68]

I used to work for someone who to keep cost down did everything possible so they did not need to pay for packaging. They obtained used packaging from various shops so they could pack their goods for shipping.
Seems they're not the only ones doing that. Got a delivery from Elraco today, it came packed in a carton that previously held 6 bottles of Jansz cúvee brut sparkling vino. That cardboard's been from Tassie to NSW via SA, it'll have more frequent flyer points than me!

[aarggh]

Price a 90kg parcel Sydney to Perth and let me know how much. This sort of stuff was my job and at one time an income when I sold stuff and I saw exactly what was happening because I was doing it. COPE will send it on its way but if you are sending a parcel to a remote area it will get handed off to the likes of AP or TNT etc and they do not have a fragile service. AP are in the end the only company that delivers to every address in Oz, the others might say they do but in the end it is handed to AP for the absolute remote deliveries.

Even AP very routinely farms out deliveries to contractors (read pizza delivery guys) and other couriers depending on load and destination. And the contractors they use can be so sub-par, they may as well be footballers the way the items are treated. The ones that don't end up "lost" that is!

cheers, Ian

[doug3030]

A few years back I ordered a 50 inch/1270mm aluminium straightedge from a company in the US. There were a number of options for the engraving of the scale and they kept getting it wrong/not as I ordered.

First straightedge turned up in a mailing tube - adequately packed, arrived intact, but not as ordered. I got in touch, they said they now understood what I had wanted and sent another.

Second one arrives similarly packed as the first, but once again wrongly engraved. I contacted them again and got them to email me a photo of the next one so I wold know it was right before it was shipped. They had told me tokeep the first two as return postage would have been about as much as their manufacturing cost.

Well the third one arrived - the box was six feet long and 18 inches by 12 inches. It contained about 25 mailing tubes, one of which contained the straightedge and the rest were empty. Reading between the lines I think that the person who delivered it to the mailroom probably said something about me supposedly being an Australian pain in the ass, and they assumed that I was the one footing the bill for the postage, which was fortunately for me, not the case. In fact I have not had to buy a mailing tube since. :2tsup:

Cheers

Doug

[DSEL74]

But what is it for Matt?

[Simplicity]

But what is it for Matt?

I needed a rod up my back to strength my persona.

Maybe a few little tools awl marking knife ext

Cheers Matt

[doug3030]

Matt, can I ask who you found with o1 tool steel in stock at the moment? Everywhere I have tried is currently out of stock in any sizes suitable for small tools, knives or anything.

Cheers

Doug

[Simplicity]

Matt, can I ask who you found with o1 tool steel in stock at the moment? Everywhere I have tried is currently out of stock in any sizes suitable for small tools, knives or anything.

Cheers

Doug

Doug I went through Amazone
Just typed in what I wanted 10 mm 01 tool steel