This is very dangerous especially if the box gets inverted. Also, you might get stuck under other cargo in a non-climate controlled storage area, or have a forklift poke into you. Mosy anyone who has worked in shipping or receiving has seen really damaged boxes.
Agreed re: loading, but it's still important to be able to carry that disintegrating box to a pack station to be repacked. Usually you can't do that on the spot, since having a box strewn about on the warehouse floor is a pretty big safety hazard.
Yes, I wondered that from the first demonstration months ago. I've got no doubt that sufficient suction can be generated for the needed lifting forces, but indeed, will the packaging tolerate it?
While my shop doesn't do a huge amount of shipping and is not a big shipper, and most boxes can tolerate it, I can definitely think of both outgoing and incoming boxes I wouldn't want to see picked up by the top... .
i've only got limited experience working in a warehouse, but i'd assume that yes, they can safely assume that any box packed loose in a shipping container or truck doesn't need to be supported from the bottom.
suction on the side or top isn't really any different from a human packer grabbing it with a hand on each side. heavier things that really need bottom support would usually be shipped on pallets.
I would think the boxes have to be spec'd to contain the suspended weight of whatever is inside them anyway. I doubt they can depend on always being supported from the bottom throughout the whole delivery chain.
I spent a few summers working at a distribution center for all the cold and frozen food for every Safeway in the state. Upstairs people put boxes onto conveyor belts, the system sorted them into lanes and downstairs people put the boxes onto "per store" pallets.
At least every 30 minutes someone would pickup a box of yogourt/orange juice/whatever and the bottom would fall out and they would wear the contents.
Boxes are NOT usually designed to be pickup up from above.
I'm curious how this works on the other side of the warehouse - in shipping. Especially once you start thinking about the games of tetris that are played when loading the container. Boxes are often not uniform in dimensions or weight, nor should they be loaded like they are in the picture if it can be avoided. They need to be interlocked (assuming non-cubic boxes) so that the entire load doesn't come crashing down if it shifts.
Speaking from experience, there's two main strategies:
1) Diligence, care, time, and luck on the part of the loader, carefully stacking boxes in such a way to make sure there isn't any room for the boxes to shift in transit or fall over when unloading.
2) Just throw it all in a big pile and hope nothing breaks.
Boxes are easier to stack and move especially if you are handling Amazon volumes of goods. Quite often the amount of items that can be carried by a truck or plane is limited by their weight not size, so it may not be as wasteful as it seems.
I had to go into the warehouse of a local shipping company the other day to identify and pick up an oversized package, and I couldn't believe how brutal the conveyor systems were. In the few minutes i was there, i saw a couple of boxes fall of a belt, and one particular box caught in a junction of a couple of belts with every other box coming through bashing against it, and no one treating any of these occurrences as a problematic issue.
I can see now how a majority of the parcels may get through ok, but the few that end up caught or trapped will end up in very poor condition.
Packages are required to survive a six foot drop without damages during shipping, so to some extent it’s very difficult to shake a correctly-packaged shipment and damage it with human strength alone.
Typically the way to handle this is to use metal bands to affix it to a pallet. It will be very top heavy if stored upside down, and it's easier to just move it with a forklift anyway.
These huge storage boxes look like they would severely mess with balance. I can already feel the difference in maneuverability when I put a grocery bag in front of a bike, now imagine 30kg of mail in there.
The nice thing about shipping containers is that you have walls that can provide lateral stability and a bit of retention. Loading for UPS you would basically play 3D Tetris building walls of boxes. As you neared the end of each row you would pick a box 2-3 inches too wide to fit and smash it in there to lock everything up.
To unload you most reverse the process. Unless it gets busy then you just pull the whole wall down at one time and bulldoze the boxes onto the rollers.
Restacking pallets in warehouses is way harder. It’s more like building a house of cards but no card is the same size.
Not being able to get stuff out of the warehouse in a timely manner would screw up the logistics big time though.
Maybe have outgoing boxes pass through some kind of ethanol misting system to sanitize them? with a catching tray to recirculate the condensed ethanol for reuse. Although the fire risks of such a solution would be somewhat worrying.
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