When pallets take over

You can’t always judge a book by its cover. I often say this when people ask about our shop, and that is probably the case for a lot of small fabrication shops. It is a phrase that I didn’t like at first, but I have grown to appreciate what our shop looks like versus what we are capable of producing.

When you pull up to the shop, you are often greeted by a yard full of material, carts, and pallets. Most of this stuff is temporarily stored outside so that we have a little extra room inside during the normal workday. When metal is used or stored in the racks, the pallets make their way back outside and often are stacked in a semiorganized order based on what may be worth reusing. I say that lightly, because many times the guy driving the forklift is probably the laser operator or anyone else who has something far more important to worry about than where he stacks the spent pallet.

Our pallets typically are in lengths of 8 and 10 feet—normal for deliveries from a steel supply house. The problem is, what in the heck do we do with all of them? When you are busy, the last thing you want to worry about is getting rid of pallets.

In the past we would set the broken or flimsy ones off to the side for the locals. They would come and take them, with permission of course, and use them for firewood. I don’t know if people have gotten lazier or if they just don’t want them anymore.

Another way we managed to lower the stack was to give them back to truck drivers. I’ve heard they get a few bucks for the pallets from the warehouse, but I don’t know how much truth there is to that. There may be some, but most of these guys are worried about finishing up their route in time instead of picking up our “trash.” If it were me, I would carry a stack home every chance I could. I'm always down for a few extra bucks.

Needless to say, after a while the pallet piles can get out of hand. When you let things pile up around your house or business, it starts to look bad. We all were getting tired of looking at these pallets, so we needed to make a change.

I heard a commercial on the radio recently about a company that hauls away your stuff for a small fee. I took the initiative and looked them up for some pallet removal, but they didn’t service our area. After some more searching on the internet I stumbled across a website called Thumbtack.com. It looked like a straightforward deal so I followed through with a request for quote to remove all of our pallets.

From the website I picked a picture of a truck that I thought was feasible to use and said it would take two to three trips to complete the job. I should have provided a picture of our pallet piles, but I didn’t. Maybe I was the lazy one. I was to receive a quote within 24 hours and then go from there.

The next day I got a quote for less than what I thought it would be, so I told them they had the job. I also told them we would use our forklift to make the job easier and quicker. They said they would be at the shop in a couple days to haul away our mess.

I had a couple of the guys organize all of the loose boards and clean up the yard a bit. An individual from the company that was awarded the job came with a long trailer and immediately got to work. After he returned for the second load, I went out and talked to him some more. He told me there were a lot more pallets than in the photo he saw. I was a little confused and asked him, “What picture?” He said that Google Maps had a picture, but there weren’t as many pallets in it as there were now. I held in my laughter and showed him around the shop for a few minutes.

Custom stainless steel wall inserts for a pharmaceutical plant. Photo courtesy of Barnes MetalCrafters.

My dad and I talked about his quote and knew we needed to do something to make this right, so we basically doubled the amount of the original quote. The hauler approved and said that he would be more than happy to remove them anytime, but not to wait as long on the next go-round.

When we asked him what he was going to do with all these pallets, he said he was going to make some deer stands with the good ones. “They fall apart after a few years, but by then it's time to move to the next hunting location anyway.” As for the bad ones, they were going to be used to make a “killer bonfire.” I got a kick out of that. It sounded like a good time!

When he was finished, we had a clean yard. The next day it was refreshing to pull up to the shop and not see several walls of ugly pallets taking over the yard. As stupid as it may sound, something as simple as this is often overlooked in many shops. When you get busy, occasionally you should outsource the simple stuff. We did, and it gave our guys a little relief.

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