In Praise of the Pallet
The wooden platform that keeps the world moving.
Nobody has ever gazed lovingly across a warehouse and said, ‘What a magnificent pallet.’
They are not beautiful. They are rarely new. They tend to lurk behind supermarkets, lean against factory walls or disappear beneath towers of cardboard boxes. Give a child a choice between the box and the toy inside it, and the box has at least a chance of winning. Offer the same child the pallet underneath, and enthusiasm may be harder to detect. Yet this overlooked object helps keep goods moving.
Remove the humble pallet from modern commerce, and things would start going wrong remarkably quickly.
Almost everything we buy has to move. Food, furniture, televisions, washing machines, pharmaceuticals, car parts and the device on which you are reading this have spent part of their lives travelling from one place to another. For much of that journey, they have probably been sitting on a rectangular arrangement of wooden boards that nobody notices.
The pallet may be one of the least glamorous inventions ever to have changed the world, and one of the most useful.
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