Selling used gaylords on a repeating schedule

Why regular volume matters

A buyer planning a month of packing wants to know the boxes will arrive each week. A dock with the same stack every Friday is the opposite of the odd pallet nobody planned for. If your inbound freight is steady, your empties are too, and a schedule beats an emergency.

What to say

• How many a week, and whether it is standing or knocked down
• Footprint and bottom style; slip sheets travel with partial flap boxes
• Which day the stack builds, and when a truck can reach the dock
• How long you can store before it blocks the door

The I-495 distribution belt

Marlborough, Franklin and Taunton are the big distribution addresses on this chart, with Myles Standish Industrial Park at the southern end. Say which I-495 exit you are near; it helps place a dock on the belt.

Before you write, check what can be reused. The compactor math for your dock is on the calculator page.

Building the schedule

A repeat load is a schedule, and a schedule needs three answers: the day the stack is highest, the time the dock is open, and the count at that moment. The count does not have to be exact. "Between 30 and 40" is a usable answer, and so is "it varies with the shipment, but never fewer than 20." What breaks a schedule is silence on the pickup day, so tell us who on the dock owns the stack.

When the stream changes

Streams move. A line is retooled, a customer changes packaging, a seasonal item ends. Say so when it happens: a short note changing the count or the footprint keeps the pickup matched to what is actually on the dock, and nothing about a repeat request is locked in by sending it.

What a repeat load looks like in practice

A repeat load is described by a handful of numbers: the typical count, the footprint, the day, the dock. A distribution center might write "twenty to thirty 48 x 40 x 36 triple wall, standing, every Thursday morning, door six." Each element can change, but the shape of the request stays the same.

The more regular the stream, the easier it is to describe and the easier it is to place. A dock that cannot say when its stack grows should still send a request; the first few weeks may be a way of finding the pattern.

Shortfalls and surges

Say what happens when a week is light or heavy, and how much notice you can give.