Having spent the summer working in a warehouse, lugging pallets about all over the place, I got to wondering about potential earlier developments.
All you need for pallets to become the main way of moving bulk freight is a forklift and a pallet jack. Of course, anywhere dealing with the pallets needs that latter, and the former need to be pretty widespread too, if we want to avoid most pallets getting broken down and each bit handled manually to store at any height. According to the genocide, both pallet trucks and forklifts were a thing by 1920. It was the high volume of high urgency trade in WW2, coupled with manpower shortages that lead to pallets getting adopted on a decent scale. So, I'm left with a few questions:
Hope to hear some of your ideas.
All you need for pallets to become the main way of moving bulk freight is a forklift and a pallet jack. Of course, anywhere dealing with the pallets needs that latter, and the former need to be pretty widespread too, if we want to avoid most pallets getting broken down and each bit handled manually to store at any height. According to the genocide, both pallet trucks and forklifts were a thing by 1920. It was the high volume of high urgency trade in WW2, coupled with manpower shortages that lead to pallets getting adopted on a decent scale. So, I'm left with a few questions:
- Is there any way of causing such a revolution in freight handling without the huge globe encompassing war?
- Can it be made to happen earlier, and how would that affect the Second World War?
- If there's no war, how long would it take to catch on?
Hope to hear some of your ideas.