Friday, December 3, 2021

Pallets

 Welt (the German newspaper) uttered a little shortage 'note' in the past 24 hours....over wooden pallets.  

You know....the ones used for beer, boxes, and heavy items.

It's not a national shortage item yet, but the wood typically used is deemed by suppliers as in a bit of a escalating cost situation, and becoming more difficult to procure.  

The thing is....German's entire economy moves around on wooden pallets.  Everything you touch at the local grocery....has some relationship to a wooden pallet.  

Just another odd piece of the recession going on.

2 comments:

Claudio said...

i thought of the pallets problem a while ago, and i found it is quite difficult to deal with them. while i was renovating the place i live here, most of the materials i ordered from Home Depot, they delivered on your driveway for a small fee 30-50 dollars, most of the materials were shrink wrapped on a wooden pallet, so i ended up with a large number of pallets, i asked the clerk at Home Depot desk if they take the pallets back, and the answer was no, that it costs them more to take them back and apparently i already paid for them... so i own them.
Great! What i ended up doing, was to skill saw them in smaller pieces and i took them to the dump yard, i could not properly undo them because they are made of hard wood and nailed using twisted nails - very hard to remove. It was a total waste of wood in my opinion, perfectly good pallets ended up in a landfill

Schnitzel_Republic said...

From 1999 to 2009, I worked a good bit in logistics and handling of ordered computer gear. I probably got stuck with six pallets every single week, and they all went to a base 'dump' site. I bet across the entire base, there were at least 300 pallets a week which got dumped. It's the most ridiculous 'shortage' possible. I'll bet just in the Wiesbaden garbage dump....there's probably a thousand pallets a week buried there.