Key takeaways
- Adjectives are not a specification: 'good', 'clean' and 'sound' mean whatever the person saying them believes, and the buyer finds out at their own dock.
- Publishing reject criteria is the part that matters — it commits a supplier in advance to turning away revenue.
- Returns fell from roughly one order in eleven to one in ninety in the year after we published the ladder.
- The unexpected effect: buyers who could see that 3A carries the same load as 1A moved down a rung and saved thirty per cent.
In February 2013 a seed processor outside Wichita refused a delivery of two hundred and seventy boxes. They had ordered what we described as “good used gaylords”. We had sent what we genuinely believed were good used gaylords. Both of us were right, and that was exactly the problem.
Their definition of good involved boxes that could be photographed for their own customers. Ours involved boxes that would hold fourteen hundred pounds of sorghum without complaint. The boxes on that truck did the second thing perfectly and the first thing not at all. There was no document anywhere that could settle it, because we had never written one.
Adjectives are not a specification
The used packaging trade runs on a vocabulary that sounds precise and is not. Good. Clean. Sound. Near new. Light use. Every one of those words means whatever the person saying it believes, and the buyer only discovers the gap when a trailer is already at their dock with the doors open.
This is not usually dishonesty. It is the ordinary drift that happens when the person grading has handled forty thousand boxes and the person buying has handled four hundred. A grader looking at a box with two old labels and a scuffed side wall sees a perfectly serviceable container. A buyer who ordered “clean” sees a return.
We had four years of goodwill and no way to convert it into a number. That is a business that cannot scale, and it deserved not to.
What we wrote instead
Over the following three months we wrote a five-rung ladder — 1A through 5A — with three things attached to each rung that nobody in our trade seemed to publish: what the condition actually is, what the box is genuinely good for, and what gets a box rejected at that level regardless of anything else.
That third part is the important one. Anyone can write an optimistic description. Publishing the reject criteria means committing in advance to turning away material that would otherwise have been revenue, and doing it in a way a customer can hold you to.
| Before | After |
|---|---|
| “Good used 5-wall gaylord” | Grade 2A, 48 × 40 × 36, five wall, one previous trip |
| “A few marks” | Two previous labels, light scuffing on one side wall |
| “Strong” | Derated payload 2,200 lb, stacks two high loaded |
| “Clean” | Moisture measured under 9%, no odour, no residue |
| (nothing) | Rejected if: edge crush, delamination, damp, odour |
The part we did not expect
We assumed the ladder would reduce returns. It did — from roughly one order in eleven to one in ninety over the following year. What we had not anticipated was that it would change what people bought.
Once buyers could see that 3A carried the same load as 1A and differed only in appearance, a large share of them moved down a rung and saved thirty per cent. We sold cheaper boxes and made more money, because the orders got bigger and the customers stopped leaving.
How to use this when buying from anyone
- Ask for the written grading standard. Not a description of it — the document.
- Ask what gets rejected at each grade. Suppliers who cannot answer this have not thought about it.
- Ask for photographs of the actual lot, including a bottom edge.
- Buy one pallet before you buy a truckload. Everyone reputable will encourage this.
- Hold the delivery against the written standard, not against your mental image of it.
None of that is specific to us. If a competitor answers all five properly, buy from them with confidence. The trade gets better either way, and we would rather compete on grading discipline than on adjectives.
Questions