<b>Battling the Down Economy:</b> Shipping on carts speeds deliveries

If you’re stacking your crops on delivery trucks the old fashioned way, you could be costing your company money. You could be losing customers altogether.

Shipping material on carts or racks has become standard procedure for nurseries across the country. Yes, they are an additional business expense, but they’re well worth the investment, said Ed Wright at Dewar Nurseries in Apopka, Fla.

“You can fit more on a truck. You get more payload on a truck. It’s faster and takes fewer people to load a truck,” Wright said. “It’s faster for the driver to unload and it’s easier for our customers to handle.”

The company has been using metal Cowin Global carts for 10 years and ships products from 6-inch pots to 3-gallon containers. Dewar has about 4,000 of these carts at any given time.

Dewar Nurseries puts the company name and phone number on each of the carts, but the company still loses about 5 percent of its cart stock per year. But this is just a cost of doing business, according to Wright.

“There’s some theft at our customers’ locations, and sometimes they’re picked up by other nurseries,” he said. “Some find their way back to our customers’ locations and we don’t know where they’ve been. They just appear.”

Carts are typically dropped off and left at customers’ facilities. But if a particular customer has a bad track record for losing carts, these are unloaded, put back on the truck and shipped back to Dewar.


For more: Dewar Nurseries, (407) 886-1188; www.dewarnurseries.com.
 

Using carts to ship plants offers several plusses: The practice allows you to fit more product on the truck, it’s faster, and it takes fewer people to load the truck.