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You have arrived at the web home of Noah Brier. This is mostly an archive of over a decade of blogging and other writing. You can read more about me or get in touch. If you want more recent writing of mine, most of that is at my BrXnd marketing x AI newsletter and Why Is This Interesting?, a daily email for the intellectually omnivorous.

October, 2012

Everything you ever wanted to know about pallets

The importance and history of shipping pallets revealed in a thousand-word story.
I don't know what it says about me, but I'm a sucker for thousand-word stories on things like shipping pallets. Luckily for me, Slate has gone ahead and written one (or rather they wrote one back in August). Here's a little taste:
Pallet history is both humble and dramatic. As Pallet Enterprise (“For 30 years the leading pallet and sawmill magazine”) recounts, pallets grew out of simple wooden “skids”, which had been used to help transport goods from shore to ship and were, essentially, pallets without a bottom set of boards, hand-loaded by longshoremen and then, typically, hoisted by winch into a ship’s cargo hold. Both skids and pallets allowed shippers to “unitize” goods, with clear efficiency benefits: “According to an article in a 1931 railway trade magazine, three days were required to unload a boxcar containing 13,000 cases of unpalletized canned goods. When the same amount of goods was loaded into the boxcar on pallets or skids, the identical task took only four hours.”
If that doesn't make you want to read it, I don't know what will.
October 22, 2012
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Noah Brier | Thanks for reading. | Don't fake the funk on a nasty dunk.