[Arrath]

> just keep the parcel at the depot for a week until they have a driver who can actually make the trip.

Depot workers can get up to the weirdest stuff. One time I was returning unused product (oil well perforating guns, a UN 1.4D explosive device) via Yellow Freight. I handed over the cases and signed all the appropriate paperwork to handover custody at the depot and went on about my day. The supplier called me ~10 days later saying they never received the shipment! Perturbed, I called down to the depot who basically shrugged it off with "no idea lol not our problem". Their attitude changed when I told them that in accordance with my license and federal law I would be notifying the ATF at the end of the day that there were missing or lost explosives and it would very much be their problem.

A couple hours later they called back and told me the boxes had missed their truck and were just sitting in the corner of the secure cage in the loading dock, forlorn and forgotten. What the fuck, guys.

[reaperman]

> dropped off oil well perforating guns at Yellow Freight

Holy fuck. We never shipped these using commercial couriers, but transported them using company trucks and company labor. We'd also have a heavily armed security person escorting them at all times.

For reference, these are long tubes containing many shaped charges. Sometimes you can have hundreds or thousands of shaped charges for a single perforation job. AFAIK, the oil field is the only industry that uses shaped charges outside of the military. Their primary application is piercing tank and ship armor. They kind of "implode" rather than "explode", and generate a sort of lightsaber-beam of superheated copper that lances straight through armor. In this video[0], blue is just a steel casing, yellow is the explosive, and red is the copper which pierces the target.

Not a good thing to "go missing".

0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NoetLNb1Fc4

[Arrath]

> Holy fuck. We never shipped these using commercial couriers, but transported them using company trucks and company labor. We'd also have a heavily armed security person escorting them at all times.

The manufacturer shipped them to us via Yellow, so we figured it was the simplest route to return the unused items via the same route, since they're properly credentialed and insured and all. It was a specialty project (perforating the casing in a newly drilled geothermal well at depths not more than 100m) so we only used in the realm of a dozen 50# cases of loose perforating guns and built the strings ourselves, bringing the high explosives (det cord that made up the string, detonators) from our own magazines.

> AFAIK, the oil field is the only industry that uses shaped charges outside of the military. Their primary application is piercing tank and ship armor.

They're quite often used in demolition as well, to shear through structural steel members. I've used them to bring down warehouses, bridge decks, bridge piers/supports, assorted industrial buildings and even hand built some crude shaped charges when scuttling a ship. I once went down a fun rabbit hole ordering custom built linear shaped charges for a demo project that saw the LSC's used so deep underwater that the static water pressure in the cavity of the charge would prevent the penetrator from forming properly. It was an interesting iterative design process with the manufacturer to make a sealed unit that maintained an air pocket inside the device at those depths and would seal flat agaisnt the object to be demolished. All akin to military uses sure (especially that last one, i bet the SEALS or some branch of frogmen have underwater satchel charges or limpet mines handy but those weren't available to us) but this was in the civilian construction domain.

> Not a good thing to "go missing".

Not at all!

[noisy_boy]

Lesson for US customers: If you really want your shipment to be delivered, add a bullet or a pinch of gunpowder to the shipment.

[mthoms]

Someone once suggested that if you are travelling by air and absolutely must have your checked bag arrived with you - put a starter's pistol in there (and fill out the appropriate paperwork).

The chances of that baggage being lost or misdirected is basically zero.

[Fogest]

One of the big problems I find in the shipping industry is the reliance on insurance. The idea that most packages are insured or easily replaceable. When I was a bit younger and doing some seasonal postal work in a processing plant this was the mentality. The mentality being that sometimes things will go wrong and ruin a package, but hey, whatever. Machines would sometimes destroy a package, packages would get thrown around, heavy boxes would be stacked on very small/fragile ones, etc...

Myself and many of the people I worked with all tried their best. But at the end of the day there is only so much you can do as a temp seasonal worker to prevent such things. They'd rather have a higher amount of damaged/lost items and a higher throughput.

It'd be interesting to see a competitor that made it their goal to handle packages with more care and not have this attitude. However I can't see them getting too far. They would likely have to charge more money, and any of the big companies are not going to care to pay more. They'd rather take the risk and just ship it again if it gets broken on the way. It'll end up being cheaper for them that way. The ones who lose out are the smaller businesses and individuals shipping personal items. It pissed me off when I'd see a damaged package of an item that was clearly a personal homemade thing. Something that isn't easy to just quick send another copy of.

[reaperman]

> It'd be interesting to see a competitor that made it their goal to handle packages with more care

There are "personal courier services" or "white glove courier services" where you hire a specific person to move your package from point A to point B. They stay with your package the whole time, and either carry it on a plane or drive it themselves.

It's expensive, obviously, but the service does exist.

Just like you, I'd love to see a middle-ground, scalable option exist.

[froggit]

Pharmacies use this type of personal courier service to deliver medicine filled in the store to a patient's home (since shipping prescription drugs FedEx is a great way for grandpa to run out of heart medicine). This service is often provided free of charge so it's worth checking out.

[Breza]

That's surprising. The CVS a mile from my house uses USPS Priority Mail. It might actually be cheaper if a pharmacy tech spent ten minutes driving it here.

[Nathanba]

I think there is something about the monkey brain in people that if you give them an item, they think they own it. It doesn't matter that it's just a loan or they are supposed to give it to someone else.. they think they can do whatever they want with it and anyone is lucky that they didn't mess with it. This seems to happen in the food service industry as well with the whole attitude of "be nice to us so we don't mess with your food!" The monkey brain can't help but think that it owns an item that it managed to grab. That's why I think that we need a psychological trick to make humans in package management think differently about the packages. Maybe writing something like "Fedex FAMILY Owned" on each package could do the trick. Although when I worked in a shipping facility I think people were so busy that there wasn't much "thinking" either way possible. Still we will probably just go with robots though.

[Fogest]

I think your last couple sentences is the reality. You are expected to be quick at your job and you don't have much time to think about each package. Was that a pretty heavy package you just put on top of a fragile one? That's unfortunate, but the company just doesn't give you the time to do it properly. And the company is okay with accepting that risk at the customers expense.

[scarab92]

Like most problems, it’s an externality problem.

The true cost of destroying or misplacing a parcel is often higher than the nominal value of the item inside. Sometimes it’s a sentimental good, sometimes it’s time sensitive and not having it in time results in additional costs to the recipient, sometimes the recipient spends significant time attempting to locate the package.

None of these are appropriately compensated for.

Make these companies liable for the economic cost of the goods plus $200 and they’ll start taking more care.