[gumby]

> Source: I make pallets, lots of them.

Thanks for weighing in!

>2) Customization is a factor of efficiency. Why would someone shipping a product want >to buy a standard size pallet that doesn't fit or hold the weight requirement for >his use case?

This surprises me. I certainly understand the fact that each product class will have different needs, but since transport is containerized I am astonished that the world hasn't converged on a pallet that maximizes container footprint, with the special cases being rare. I.e. people would adapt the number of units per pallet in order to optimize for the rest of the supply chain (warehouse footprint, ubiquity of available availability of etc etc). Clearly this is what Walmart et al are trying for.

But instead, to use a software analogy, abstraction is frozen at the container level but below that everything is largely bespoke. I don't know if there is some path dependency for this or if it's simply that the other parts of the supply chain are still highly fragmented and/or specialized.

Thanks again for your comment!