I ordered some oil from a well-known on-line specialist not far from where I live in Cornwall
Here is the ‘track and trace’ outlining its journey by FedEx
Wednesday , 11/25/20209:22 amLAUNCESTON GB
On FedEx vehicle for delivery
6:02 amLAUNCESTON GB
At local FedEx facility
Tuesday , 11/24/20205:28 pmRIDGMONT GB
Departed FedEx location
Monday , 11/23/20204:49 pmLAUNCESTON GB
Picked up
4:36 am
Shipment information sent to FedEx
So, overnight the parcel has been taken from Launceston to Bedfordshire and back again…quite possibly on the same vehicle.
I know how the ‘hub and spoke’ model operates, but this is just stupid.
But, for me the customer, it was still cheaper than going to pick the oil up from the depot, which is about 20 miles from where I live, because delivery was free for an order of over £70!
It’s a mad, mad world.
Then head about 15 ks up the mountain and load cherry toms on the vine to deliver to our yard in the UK. Pack and grade aforementioned cherry toms and ship to Safeway Aylesford as it was back then. Load Safeway Aylesford for onward delivery to the Gibraltar store. Watch as cherry tomatoes are then put on the shelves about 15ks from where they were grown.
I’ve picked up parcels in Midhurst Sussex for Farnham back when I subbed for TNT out ofAlton , but at the time Byfleet served Farnham
So said parcels went all the way to Alperton and back
Midhurst to Farnham is 8 miles so is Alton
Then head about 15 ks up the mountain and load cherry toms on the vine to deliver to our yard in the UK. Pack and grade aforementioned cherry toms and ship to Safeway Aylesford as it was back then. Load Safeway Aylesford for onward delivery to the Gibraltar store. Watch as cherry tomatoes are then put on the shelves about 15ks from where they were grown.
Reminds me of a story a coworker told me
He would pick up large blocks of butter in uk drive to Belgium back it on a bay then take 9 hours off
Trailer would be unloaded , butter cut and packed in to 250g blocks and reloaded on truck
End of 9 hours he would drive back to Blighty
Not really but then again I’m capable of thinking a bit bigger than small scale. Chances are that your individual single bottle was part of a bulk collection from that company so that company could have got a full cage or pallet worth collected from them, of which yours is just one package in dozens. It is much more efficient to leave it in there and send the full lot to the hub to be machine sorted than to have the depot dig through all the dozens of items in that cage/pallet just in case there might be one that is in their depot coverage area and repackage it.
So in short what’s more efficient:
Have one person ■■■■■■■ for 10 minutes unpacking a cage to go through everything just in case there’s one for a local delivery and then another 5 minutes putting it all back
Have that same person spend just a minute putting the whole cage on a night trunk trailer, send the whole lot to a hub where it’s all chucked on a conveyor system and put into automated sorting and then IF there happens to be something in that cage for a local delivery put that one parcel onto the delivery van?
It’s option 2 every single time which is why parcel networks don’t go sorting through bulk collections.
Now if they were picking up just a few loose packages from the company then it’s a different story but having worked for a few different pallet/parcel networks and doing business collections they tended to be dozens of items already sat in a cage at the senders waiting for me to turn up to collect.
A few years ago, I was based at a customers premises in Hartlepool, and they used to send items up to Aberdeen for the oil industry. They asked me one day if I could get a rather large item to said Granite City by 07.30 the next morning. “No problem” said I.
I was then asked if we sent someone from their place, straight up with it. When I said no, it goes like this: Hartlepool - Ossett - Manchester - Glasgow - Aberdeen, they were much taken aback and said it would never happen, but happen it did. The funny thing was, even then, it cost them less than sending it direct.
Our industry can be strange at the best of times, but I do love explaining the uninitiated how it works.
45 years ago we would load coal at one of the numerous Open Cast coal sites in north west Durham, to reach the NCB disposal point we had to drive past the gates of the washer plant at the Morrison ■■■■■ pit.
Once at the NCB disposal site it was on to the weighbridge, tip the load on the stock heap, back to the weighbridge and tare off and very often go back to the stock heap and put the same load of coal back on and take it up to the aforementioned washer plant.
This went on five days a week for years and the daily tonnage double transported like this was approx 500 tons, the extra mileage per load was about 20 miles.
I dare bet the same thing or similar was repeated at various locations around the country.
I’ve never been able to work out the advantage of hub systems.Just loads of wasted time and fuel of freight being taken on silly detours and needless transhipments.
Direct trunks are best all round both for the driver and the operation whether shorter runs or the longer ones.
Not really but then again I’m capable of thinking a bit bigger than small scale. Chances are that your individual single bottle was part of a bulk collection from that company so that company could have got a full cage or pallet worth collected from them, of which yours is just one package in dozens. It is much more efficient to leave it in there and send the full lot to the hub to be machine sorted than to have the depot dig through all the dozens of items in that cage/pallet just in case there might be one that is in their depot coverage area and repackage it.
So in short what’s more efficient:
Have one person ■■■■■■■ for 10 minutes unpacking a cage to go through everything just in case there’s one for a local delivery and then another 5 minutes putting it all back
Have that same person spend just a minute putting the whole cage on a night trunk trailer, send the whole lot to a hub where it’s all chucked on a conveyor system and put into automated sorting and then IF there happens to be something in that cage for a local delivery put that one parcel onto the delivery van?
It’s option 2 every single time which is why parcel networks don’t go sorting through bulk collections.
Now if they were picking up just a few loose packages from the company then it’s a different story but having worked for a few different pallet/parcel networks and doing business collections they tended to be dozens of items already sat in a cage at the senders waiting for me to turn up to collect.
I spoke with the van driver…he said that the local depot used to have the facility to keep local parcels, but this was removed in the interest of ‘efficiency’. As you say, too much trouble to segregate the ‘locals’ from the ‘nationals’ and even ‘internationals’.
He added that the company had local agricultural customers preparing consignments of fresh food, flowers etc for destinations in Cornwall/Devon, and they were finding that the little return trip across the south of England wasn’t doing the products a lot of good.
Just to pee on Conors chips a bit… at peak times (like now) Royal Mail do a pre sort of mail collected and retain the majority of local deliveries without sending them to the mail centre. Onviously some get missed, go to the mail centre and get sorted automatically like normal, but it eases pressure on the system.
toonsy:
Just to pee on Conors chips a bit… at peak times (like now) Royal Mail do a pre sort of mail collected and retain the majority of local deliveries without sending them to the mail centre. Onviously some get missed, go to the mail centre and get sorted automatically like normal, but it eases pressure on the system.
UK mail used to sort everything at local level, keep locals and then send some to brum and some to London different trunks obviously
I think UPS still sort at local level as well, unless it’s a customer bulk collection straight to the hub
toonsy:
Just to pee on Conors chips a bit… at peak times (like now) Royal Mail do a pre sort of mail collected and retain the majority of local deliveries without sending them to the mail centre. Onviously some get missed, go to the mail centre and get sorted automatically like normal, but it eases pressure on the system.
Ignoring the fact that RM made a £200m loss this year on the mail side so maybe not convincing anyone it’s a good idea…
But it’s worth RM doing that because they tend to have a high volume going to the local area the collection is done from and they run rigids on night trunks to adjacent towns and cities. With parcel networks they don’t.
When I was a kid, the local main Post Office had two posting slots in the wall outside; one for local mail, the other for everything else. I happened to be queuing at the counter one day when of of the postmen collected the mail for sorting. I noticed that both slots discharged into a single sack hung underneath…
Conor:
But it’s worth RM doing that because they tend to have a high volume going to the local area the collection is done from and they run rigids on night trunks to adjacent towns and cities. With parcel networks they don’t.
We did nightly direct trunks Feltham - Charlton -Feltham, Feltham-Southampton-Feltham and Feltham - East Hoathly Sussex - Feltham and Feltham - Harrietsham - Feltham.All using artics and more than one run covered by one driver in a shift.Such as the Southampton and the East Hoathly return runs. Southampton was done first then East Hoathly from memory.
We rotated them among us on a weekly rota with the longer trunks.
Hub systems are a joke.