So this is material on pallets, but not including household-type moving nor material needing specialized trailers?

Palletized shipping is an entirely different world. I recently bought an Optigan (Itself worthy of a HN discussion) and it was shipped on a pallet. Despite mediocre 1970s plastic construction it arrived alive. The shipping experience is hardly door to door. I had to drive to an opposite side of Houston in a ramshackle shipping area that could best be described as sketchy. That said, the folks working there while few were great and helped me load it up and get on my way... Point being I could see that UPS doesnt see a big future in that business. There isnt really a good way to last mile stuff like that cheaply.

Door to door LTL with lift gates is a thing. The shipper has to request that specific service. Basically, you bought from someone that either didn't know how, or didn't care, to do it the right way. Compared to regular UPS/Fedex, the big downside is that someone has to be there when it arrives. They won't just leave it at your door if you're not there.

The LTL market is ~$46B/year, and was growing prior to COVID. The COVID hit makes sense, as the big boys don't do a lot of LTL, having enough volume to do full truckloads.

I've also seen it where the customer doesn't really understand this shipping service. Jarvis desks have multiple warnings about delivering to your house. IIRC if you live in NYC they don't even let you chose that option, you have to pay $150 more for lift gate.

That's really a big issue. Lift gates are expensive, require maintenance.

Rando homeowner won't understand why that's 'extra' and such because we're used to things being adapted to hour home ... not a loading dock.

Sometimes shippers just say "we assume you have a loading dock" because they can't be arsed to care about it. More than once I've unloaded a pallet a box at a time from the back of the trailer while the driver was pissed he had to tip the boxes over onto my shoulder. If you ever have to hire an excavator for other reasons, it isn't a bad idea to have an outdoor "hump dock" built... the other option is a forklift!

I believe the NYC case is somewhat unique. Lift gate is extra, but not $150 extra or anything near that for most places. Meaning the extra charge from the actual carrier.

Yeah, I ordered a power rack from Rogue last summer, and it got here a few months ago. We live a ways down a pretty narrow private road and despite talking to the UPS freight manager a couple of times, they kept sending full sized 18 wheelers which would have a hell of a time coming down the road and turning around, not to mention probably damaging the road. After 3 times of them sending a full sized truck over the course of 2 weeks I just rented a UHaul and drove across the damn metro to get it.

B2C freight is a bit of a shit show.

I forget exactly what it was because it was ages ago but it was some furniture that wasn't too big or heavy but was apparently (at least at the time) too big or at too expensive to ship by normal delivery. I live at the end of a 500 foot dirt driveway and some big truck pulls up at the end. I'm not sure if they could have got down my driveway and actually gotten back out but they sure didn't want to. Ended up unpacking at the side of the road and I got it down my driveway somehow.

There are three companies specialized at that kind of stuff in Germany (they also serve other EU countries): a DHL brancha service from Rhenus and Hermes (Otto's logistics arm, Otto is one of the oldest mail order companies in Germany and transitioned rather well to the "internet"). The latter also contracted to Amazon, but is working exclusively in-house for quite a while now.

Quite an interesting business, somewhere between standard parcel and LTL.

Mostly palletized, but also crates...stuff like say, a pool table.

There's also some cases where boxes over LTL makes sense...big boxes that are lightweight. Normal UPS and Fedex charge "dimensional weight", where shipping a large box that's light is charged by size, not weight. Sometimes that pushes the price much higher than LTL.

If you want something that is too big for a box (like crates or pallets) but not big enough to ship a whole truckload, then you ship LTL.

We build pallets of boxes to ship coast to coast. It ends up being less expensive, faster, and the boxes arrive in better condition. Our west coast customers are set up to receive pallets which is nice.

Yeah, pretty much so. LTL is usually B2B, either for smaller shipments. Hence, less than a full truck volume vise. And it is a royal pain, also for businesses. You are mixing cargo with other clients, you are depending on a third party schedule and routing. There are multiple touch points increasing the risk of damage. Usually, there are multiple carriers involved.

And funny enough, there is close to zero synergy with an existing parcel network or an existing full truck load business. Besides being able to use the same trucks. And since most trucks are owned by third parties anyway, well even those synergies are small.

That being said, the LTL business is huge. It just seems that UPS is streamlining its own operation.

Generally pallets are most common, but it can vary.

I always thought LTL meant “load-transfer-load”. Like what they do at LTL warehouses.

That operation is referred to as crossdocking in the industry. Pretty silly that people would downvote you for that though.

It’s worse. All my posts are quickly downvoted, no matter the final count they always start with a downvote. I think someone I pissed off is running a bot.

Might be worth shooting DanG an email. If one particular someone is downvoting every one of your posts, that ought to show up loud and clear in the database. That kind of behavior is not something HN wants to allow, I would think.

Thanks but HN is rather toxic I don’t really think it would make a difference. I pray nothing I make ever gets posted here.

It's just HN. This whole community is more liberal with the downvote button than pretty much anywhere else on the Internet. It tends to even out over time though. Don't worry about it.

That sort of thing definitely happens sometimes on HN.