[78-L] It's Tight Like That - packing lessons from R Buckminster Fuller

[Rodger Holtin]

I work for one of the college bookstores.  Actually, it's an auxiliary enterprise as most of our business is generated by long-distance phone or internet, not textbooks.  The particulars are not important to the discussion, but the fact that we ship lots of stuff from books to CDs to plastic cups is relevant to the discussion of e8ay and shipping.  We are the largest UPS shipper in a county with several manufacturing plants and we accept packages for the campus as well as the community at large.  This week alone I've shipped 400 packages including countless books, several CDs, a wheel chair, a video projector, tractor transmission parts, motorcycle seats and a teddy bear.  

The sandwich floating in packing of whatever kind is a good rule for most anything.  Integrity of the outside box is often ignored.  It fractures me that people will tape the living wampus over the top of the box (barely adhering to the concave box top) and ignore the bottom that is coming apart as they walk in the door with it.  They don't pay me to wrap and pack and it's supposed to be all done when they come through the door, but since I am the shipper of record [no pun] the claim will end up on my desk, so it behooves me to be as sure as I can that it goes out with a fighting chance.  

Having been on the receiving end of packages from this store gave me an advantage of having seen what a poor packing job does for books and pamphlets on the other end.  They used to ship piles of magazine-like literature held together with rubber bands and tossed in the bottom of the box with wrinkled paper filling the void at the top.  The stuff would shift around in there, the ink would smear and the rubber bands would tear the edges of the top and bottom pieces -- not damaged bad enough to warrant a claim or refuse the stuff, but enough to be annoying at best.   No more.  We wrap everything with that stretch wrap like Saran that you can get at any office supply store now.  I use that stuff like a cook uses salt.

Same goes for the outside box - and this is the point for packing records.  Be SURE the box is FULL of packing to the point that it is almost hard to close.  If it's not, the box is sure to collapse the first time it gets something stacked on top of it.  You want all six sides of that box to be tight.  This is the tension that creates the integrity of the package.  Fuller called it "tensegrity" when building his geodesic domes and boats and what not.  Take a new bag of potato chips, lay it on the table and slap it with the palm of your hand.  You won't break many chips until you burst the bag.  Until it bursts, the gas in the bag keeps the bag tight and protects the chips.

Bubble mailers are great tools, too, but they must be used correctly.

The boss of the store told me they used to have trouble sending cassettes and CDs in bubble mailers and UPS told them to double box them.  Well, that was too much trouble, and small boxes are hard to come by without buying them, so they used larger boxes and filled them with more paper.  Same problem, and boxes are expensive compared to bubble mailers.  We get lots of big boxes that we can't reuse to ship so we harvest the cardboard.  When I came we started using the two layers of corrugated cardboard with corrugations at 90 degrees from each other (78 sandwich style) and ship them in bubble mailers again, but the mailers are now folded to fit the sandwich and taped tightly closed.  Not a loss in five years.

For the newbees - 78 content - "It's Tight Like That" was a common jazz tune of the 1920s appearing on many 78 labels.

Rodger



For Best Results use Victor Needles - and lots of stretch film.



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