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Author Topic:   I have a package coming.
jar
Member (Idle past 394 days)
Posts: 34026
From: Texas!!
Joined: 04-20-2004


Message 1 of 16 (888141)
09-06-2021 6:47 AM


So I ordered a bunch of Kleenex Tissues.
They originated in a warehouse in Arlington, Tx; about 500 miles from me.
They are now in Louisville, Ky; about 1400 miles from me.
Does this make sense?
Is there a way to change general behavior?
Edited by jar, : No reason given.

My Website: My Website

Replies to this message:
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AZPaul3
Member
Posts: 8513
From: Phoenix
Joined: 11-06-2006
Member Rating: 5.3


Message 2 of 16 (888147)
09-06-2021 4:26 PM
Reply to: Message 1 by jar
09-06-2021 6:47 AM


Does this make sense?
Without further info certainly we cannot make that judgement.
Shipping strategies vary. The FedEx model makes perfect economic and efficiency sense. That is one reason why they were so successful.
Is there a way to change general behavior?
This has nothing to do with general behavior, does it? Unless I miss my guess there may be very good economic efficiency reasons why your tissues took a side trip on their way to you.

Eschew obfuscation. Habituate elucidation.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 1 by jar, posted 09-06-2021 6:47 AM jar has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 3 by jar, posted 09-06-2021 6:10 PM AZPaul3 has replied

  
jar
Member (Idle past 394 days)
Posts: 34026
From: Texas!!
Joined: 04-20-2004


Message 3 of 16 (888148)
09-06-2021 6:10 PM
Reply to: Message 2 by AZPaul3
09-06-2021 4:26 PM


Yes, exactly. Economy wins over environment. FedEx and UPS and even the Post Office as well as almost all businesses are Economy driven rather than environment or sustainability driven.
But if we really are going to try to address stuff like global warming we will almost certainly need to look beyond Economy.

My Website: My Website

This message is a reply to:
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Replies to this message:
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AZPaul3
Member
Posts: 8513
From: Phoenix
Joined: 11-06-2006
Member Rating: 5.3


Message 4 of 16 (888149)
09-06-2021 6:43 PM
Reply to: Message 3 by jar
09-06-2021 6:10 PM


FedEx and UPS and even the Post Office as well as almost all businesses are Economy driven rather than environment or sustainability driven.
Of course. This is capitalism.
When you look into the mechanisms you find that cost is usually directly proportional to resource utilization. Less resources used, less cost. Unless the seller is really stupid their shipping policy is geared toward least cost which should mean less resource utilization.
The rub comes in when you realize the cost associated with the resource is wildly understated. It reflects only the economic costs but not subjective environmental costs.
Edited by AZPaul3, : No reason given.

Eschew obfuscation. Habituate elucidation.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 3 by jar, posted 09-06-2021 6:10 PM jar has replied

Replies to this message:
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jar
Member (Idle past 394 days)
Posts: 34026
From: Texas!!
Joined: 04-20-2004


Message 5 of 16 (888150)
09-06-2021 7:16 PM
Reply to: Message 4 by AZPaul3
09-06-2021 6:43 PM


Exactly.

My Website: My Website

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Minnemooseus
Member
Posts: 3941
From: Duluth, Minnesota, U.S. (West end of Lake Superior)
Joined: 11-11-2001
Member Rating: 10.0


Message 6 of 16 (888151)
09-06-2021 7:21 PM
Reply to: Message 1 by jar
09-06-2021 6:47 AM


The evil empire (Amazon.com)?
I suppose this order is from Amazon?
How about supporting a local business instead? Of course, maybe they're getting from Amazon.
Moose

Professor, geology, Whatsamatta U
Evolution - Changes in the environment, caused by the interactions of the components of the environment.

"Do not meddle in the affairs of cats, for they are subtle and will piss on your computer." - Bruce Graham

"The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness." - John Kenneth Galbraith

"Yesterday on Fox News, commentator Glenn Beck said that he believes President Obama is a racist. To be fair, every time you watch Glenn Beck, it does get a little easier to hate white people." - Conan O'Brien

"Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable." - John Kenneth Galbraith

It says something about the qualities of our current president that the best argument anyone has made in his defense is that he didn't know what he was talking about. - Paul Krugman (as stolen from Chiroptera's signature)

"My fellow Americans, I'm pleased to tell you today that I've signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes" - Ronald Reagan (1984)

"I know a little about a lot of things, and a lot about a few things, but I'm highly ignorant about everything." - Moose


This message is a reply to:
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AZPaul3
Member
Posts: 8513
From: Phoenix
Joined: 11-06-2006
Member Rating: 5.3


Message 7 of 16 (888152)
09-06-2021 7:50 PM
Reply to: Message 6 by Minnemooseus
09-06-2021 7:21 PM


Re: The evil empire (Amazon.com)?
You ever see tissues in West Texas? They're green and they got needles all over them. Local stores carry them under First Aid cuz you'll need that if you use them.

Eschew obfuscation. Habituate elucidation.

This message is a reply to:
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jar
Member (Idle past 394 days)
Posts: 34026
From: Texas!!
Joined: 04-20-2004


(1)
Message 8 of 16 (888153)
09-06-2021 8:06 PM
Reply to: Message 6 by Minnemooseus
09-06-2021 7:21 PM


Re: The evil empire (Amazon.com)?
Not Amazon and I thought it was a local (but big box) store. I did order online because I simply do not go into stores anymore if there is anyway to avoid it. Locally we are back at the Covid-19 infection rates last seen a year ago AND no longer actually reporting many cases. For example Texas schools are not required to report either student or faculty Covid-19 cases. There is also absolutely no attempt for contact tracing and our State government is prohibiting mask mandates or vaccine requirements.

My Website: My Website

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AZPaul3
Member
Posts: 8513
From: Phoenix
Joined: 11-06-2006
Member Rating: 5.3


Message 9 of 16 (888154)
09-06-2021 8:23 PM
Reply to: Message 5 by jar
09-06-2021 7:16 PM


Me says: The rub comes in when you realize the cost associated with the resource is wildly understated. It reflects only the economic costs but not subjective environmental costs.
jar: Exactly.
Are you willing to pay the actual cost of your tissue? Who determines the environmental costs?
The same for transport. What environmental cost is assessed for road? The cost of the trees that won’t be grown? Smog? Cancers?
Too messy. But this is exactly what needs to be done, not on some case-by-case basis, but on a national policy basis. That makes it a political issue on how/who makes that assessment. Enter the arena of Big Carbon, the environmental impact study, and that perennial favorite, Smoke and Mirrors In the Halls of Congress.
You’re in Texas (my sympathies btw) but do you really trust your state to assess carbon costs of gas and oil?
Ok, put down the cane I really didn't think so. Easy there.
You and I could probably come up with a pretty good plan in a few posts but we don’t have $$$trillions at stake in wealth, influence, power. That’s the kind of money to kill for, literally.
Assessing an environmental tax on our production, use and waste of materials, gasses and heat, is a call to battle.
Probably not going to happen. Now what?

Eschew obfuscation. Habituate elucidation.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 5 by jar, posted 09-06-2021 7:16 PM jar has replied

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LamarkNewAge
Member (Idle past 738 days)
Posts: 2236
Joined: 12-22-2015


Message 10 of 16 (888155)
09-06-2021 10:34 PM


A "warehouse" is the tissue company's holdings facility? I don't know what that means.
There are stores that buy products and they get the products shipped to a "distribution center". Think Office Depot. A distribution center is solely for products the store sells in its stores (or online). Office Depot distribution centers only ship products to its retail stores.
Freight companies (think trucks) will ship the products to the actual "store", from the "distribution center".
If you, or a small business, buy a product then there are freight companies that have multiple "terminals" where they have loads of shipments transported from "terminal" to "terminal" ( Roadway, Yellow, Pjax, etc. are these types). The idea is to divide & separate the shipments from one load, and to get them sorted into a load to another "terminal" or to the final destination. There will be 2 totally different types of trucks used for either LINE HAUL or LOCAL. Local is a day shift job and the trucks make multiple deliveries. The local trucks are much smaller and 1 piece attached trucks. LINE HAUL is the 2 piece Tractor/Trailor. It will go from terminal to terminal.
(Before all of these steps is the factory itself)
Edited by LamarkNewAge, : No reason given.

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dwise1
Member
Posts: 5930
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.8


Message 11 of 16 (888156)
09-06-2021 10:51 PM
Reply to: Message 7 by AZPaul3
09-06-2021 7:50 PM


Re: The evil empire (Amazon.com)?
You ever see tissues in West Texas? They're green and they got needles all over them.
Don't they also sometimes cook them and eat them? I think that's called nopales.
I still have some "vivi verde" ("live green") fazzoletti (tissues) we picked up at a Coop in Italy. Made completely from recycled paper, they are off-white and a bit rough, but not too bad.
Similarly, half a century ago European toilet paper was notoriously rough. In the German TV commercials for a new plush TP, first they rubbed a peach with sandpaper to demonstrate the effect of using the other brands, then rubbed another peach with a piece of their plush TP.
 
From Message 4:
Of course. This is capitalism.
When you look into the mechanisms you find that cost is usually directly proportional to resource utilization. Less resources used, less cost. Unless the seller is really stupid their shipping policy is geared toward least cost which should mean less resource utilization.
First thing to note is that jar's package is not the only one being shipped. The most inefficient way to deliver everything would be send a vehicle out for every single package. The massive waste of such a ludicrous approach to shipping would just go on and on (eg, the need for a massive fleet of delivery vehicles, massive manpower demands to drive those vehicles, enormous amount of fuel expended generating massive quantities of exhaust gases, etc).
So a next step up would be to sort the packages so that all packages going out to the same place would be put in the same vehicle. Better, but still costly. Maybe also make intermediate stops along the way, but that would require the establishment of regular cross-county routes which would be costly to plan as well as costly to maintain (runs would still have to be made even for a light load).
So what most do is to set up a distribution network and route the packages to the distribution center that services the destination address. From my second grade field trip to the Post Office (late-50's; it's still there), I still remember their description of how they sort the incoming mail. The letters for within the city would be sorted for the routes. The letters for neighboring cities and rural areas (I think we still had some back then) would go into sacks that would be trucked to their post offices. The letters for out of the local area would go into another sack which would be sent to the bulk mailing centers (BMC) where they would be sorted by region and sent to those regions' BMCs where they would be sorted back down to individual communities.
Part of making all this more economical is to ship in volume: basically it costs you about the same to transport a ton of cargo from one place to another in a single vehicle than a pound of cargo (disregarding minor details). So it wasn't just jar's package that got shipped to Kentucky, but a figurative ton of other packages as well. Plus, Kentucky is where they have a distribution center which sorts everything out (a cost in and of itself) to be sent out to regional distribution centers. Those planes (I assume that they go by air) would be making those flights anyway, so by transporting in bulk they keep the overall cost down (eg, by eliminating any special handling of individual items).
So working out the cost of shipping a single individual item would undoubtedly give us different results than the cost of the entire logistical enterprise.

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dwise1
Member
Posts: 5930
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.8


Message 12 of 16 (888158)
09-06-2021 11:26 PM
Reply to: Message 10 by LamarkNewAge
09-06-2021 10:34 PM


A "warehouse" is the tissue company's holdings facility? I don't know what that means.
I worked in Navy warehouses for a decade (reserve duty one weekend a month) mainly pulling requisitions and packaging them for shipping. Needless to say, when Trump said his second stupidest thing at the start of his totally f**king up our COVID response ("We're not a shipping company", completely overlooking the primary function of the DLA (Defense Logistics Agency), perhaps the biggest shipping company ever), I had a few choice words to say about him.
Warehousing cost. One of our reserve unit's SUPPOs (Supply officer) worked for Toyota who gained fame through their use of "just-in-time" (JIT) techniques intended to minimize the amount of inventory you need to keep warehoused -- at khaki calls or reserve-weekend dining, he would set up a JIT supply line of sugar packets for our coffee, staging a new packet for each one we would pick up and use.
Included in such a system is keeping track of your bench stock so that whenever the quantity of a part dropped below a certain point, you would order more (factoring in lead time, etc) so that you would never run out of the part while still minimizing the size of your bench stock. That was also an important factor taught us in the Supply Corps UADPS class.
Now we can apply that to the disappearance of TP when the pandemic hit. In normal times, a store knows from its point-of-sale system how fast TP sells and how much they still have in stock, so they apply that to their known lead-time for ordering (if you need X amount of an item, how long before it will be delivered?) and they place the replenishment order for the TP. TP takes up a lot of space (in warehousing, space is money) while also being a low profit item.
That means that a store cannot afford to "have more in the back". Nor can a distribution center afford to keep a lot of TP warehoused, but only just enough, based on a history of past demand, to respond to replenishment orders and to trigger them to send their own replenishment orders to the factory.
So the description I heard of what happened was that there was panic buying by the public trying to hoard what they could (canned soup and pasta were also big items to disappear, along with yeast which led to a revival of sourdough baking). That threw off the stores' buying practices, so they placed sudden high demand on the distributors, which stripped them of their "just-in-time" stock so they placed sudden high demand on the factories who could churn out TP only so fast -- IOW, the factories normally work at a slow and steady that cannot respond to such sudden high demand.
But it gets weirder. There are actually two different and separate TP markets in the US: commercial and residential. Commercial is the single ply stuff you find in public restrooms and in company restrooms, while residential is what you buy for use at home. Suddenly with nobody going in to work, commercial TP was not being used and residential use skyrocketed, making the TP shortage in the stores even worse. Commercial TP factories cannot be retooled to make residential and vice-versa. Plus, there would be no financial incentive for them to do so since TP is such a low-profit item which can only make money in large bulk, which in turn would be far too expensive to store in warehouses (thus dashing any plans for a national emergency TP stockpile).
I would think that the logistics of tissues are not much different than that of TP.

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xongsmith
Member
Posts: 2578
From: massachusetts US
Joined: 01-01-2009
Member Rating: 6.8


Message 13 of 16 (888159)
09-07-2021 1:34 AM
Reply to: Message 8 by jar
09-06-2021 8:06 PM


Re: The evil empire (Amazon.com)?
jar writes:
Not Amazon and I thought it was a local (but big box) store. I did order online because I simply do not go into stores anymore if there is anyway to avoid it. Locally we are back at the Covid-19 infection rates last seen a year ago AND no longer actually reporting many cases. For example Texas schools are not required to report either student or faculty Covid-19 cases. There is also absolutely no attempt for contact tracing and our State government is prohibiting mask mandates or vaccine requirements.
Sad!
your Governor should be killed.
immediately.

"I'm the Grim Reaper now, Mitch. Step aside."

- xongsmith, 5.7d


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ringo
Member (Idle past 412 days)
Posts: 20940
From: frozen wasteland
Joined: 03-23-2005


Message 14 of 16 (888161)
09-07-2021 11:54 AM


A young fellow I used to work with went to Orlando for Christmas a few years ago. Coming home, he flew from Orlando to Atlanta to Dallas to New York to Toronto to Calgary to here. (To be fair, weather may have been a factor.)
Every day, I see the contrails of jets flying between Toronto and Calgary - going right over my head. You have to go through Calgary to get to Toronto from here - 400 miles in the opposite direction.
I have a cousin who lives on Vancouver Island. His brother lives in Newfoundland. They couldn't get any further apart without getting their feet wet. A couple of years ago, they were both coming here for a family reunion - and they ran into each other at the Calgary airport.

"I've been to Moose Jaw, now I can die." -- John Wing

  
jar
Member (Idle past 394 days)
Posts: 34026
From: Texas!!
Joined: 04-20-2004


Message 15 of 16 (888183)
09-09-2021 9:11 AM
Reply to: Message 9 by AZPaul3
09-06-2021 8:23 PM


Actually I'd be more than willing to make some pretty drastic if that were possible. I miss the days when certain things had there seasons and then were gone for the rest of the year. I'd be willing to do without if there were reasonable options.
But the issue of honesty is real. We do not educate people to be thoughtful, but rather consumers and worker bees.
And so I don't see much opportunity for reasonable change.
That does not mean though that such change may well be mandated and enforced by reality.

My Website: My Website

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