At my work, the new CEO decided to purchase the UPS automated routing system. If you guys could see this think in action, you would want to jump of a tall building immediately! After the last 3 weeks, I now completely understand why shipping is so expensive. It truly is outrageous for even a package as small as the small flat rate package to cost basically $5 to deliver, including the fact that it runs priority in 2-3 days. Consider how little space that fills on a truck. I can ship a 4000 lb pallet from Lansing Michigan to Ed's doorstep in Wisconsin the very next day at a cost of $200. The reason mostly comes down to logistics and software. If you have a truck and it is 48 foot long, then it can hold 22 pallets. If each spot was a different customer..and that is a rare circumstance, but even so, with 22 customers, a human can look at a map and make decisions as to what goes to where in what order. It's a simple process. When you have a small flat rate box, it goes in a bin with another 1000 flat rate boxes and you put 22 bins on a truck and every box is a different person so now you have 22000 customers on a truck. No human can work fast enough to sort all that stuff using a map. So now you are talking about using bar codes to store information which goes into a computer and it directs all the traffic to all the various distribution centers and then to the actual trucks that go to your house. The software has a billion flaws in it. For one thing, the software only accepts left turns. I'm not kidding, you can only turn left to get to where you are going, because right turns are dangerous. The computer actually designs the route according to left turns. If there's too many left turns you might have to just keep going straight for a few hours and make a delivery and then come back to where you started, bouncing back and forth wasting hundreds of miles. The computer only will calculate the shortest possible distance as well, and that includes no truck routes and back alleys and low bridges or cow lanes, whatever. So the computer is constantly sending you to places you can't be with your vehicle and either way, we all know that the shortest way is often not the quickest way. Then the damn thing says you have to go three miles...at 35 mph it is 5.5 minutes plus 3 lights which we allow you 12 seconds per light you have 6 min to get there, but it takes me 3 blocks just to reach the speed limit and I always get the red light for 25 seconds and have to shift back up to speed and it takes 12 min to get there and the qualcom is squacking what is wrong with me. So I a flustered. The computer is telling me to go here, then go there, driving back and forth, up and down, past places where I need to go over and over again. The system will add 100 miles to a 300 mile trip due to making left turns only and prioritzing stops in a way that nobody can understand. I had to go to a city yesterday, then another city was 1 hr north for my next stop, then the 3rd stop was in the same city I was originally in and the 4th stop was 1 hr north of my 2nd stop. UPS, USPS, Fed Ex, they all do this exact same thing. Yet, if it was done by humans the job would be far too large to possible, so the computer insanity is the only option. Hundreds of thousands of extra miles per day when you add up all the trucks in the system, that translates to fuel and labour, and as a customer you have to cover those losses. To see it in action is un believable..you laugh, you cry.
