Nestable and Stackable Pallets: Rhode Island

Rhode Island, by road

Start with the map. It is the smallest state, so a truck from Providence is across a border within the hour. The Interstates I-95 and I-195 set the haul lengths, and the longer the haul, the more an empty stack's height matters.

The state reports 5,152 warehousing jobs, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics withholds county detail here, so there is no county split. It shares a land border with Connecticut and Massachusetts.

Warehousing in numbers

Rhode Island reports no refrigerated warehouse capacity separately in the USDA table we used, so the cold question depends on the individual customer.

Reading the numbers

• Warehousing and storage employs 5,152 people in Rhode Island, 1.00 for every warehousing job.
• Food manufacturing employs 3,769 people in Rhode Island, 0.73 for every warehousing job.
• Rhode Island holds 0.27 percent of US warehousing jobs, about one in every 370, spread over 40 establishments averaging 129 jobs each.
• Connecticut has 25,127 warehousing jobs, 4.88 times the 5,152 in Rhode Island.
• Massachusetts has 20,695 warehousing jobs, 4.02 times the 5,152 in Rhode Island.

Who ships pallets here

In Rhode Island, warehousing and storage employs 5,152. Most of the demand is for general pallets in the common footprint, with the choice split between rack service and block stacking. It tends to lean on rackable where the pallet lives on beams, stackable for block stacking, nestable for the empties that go back, usually in 48 x 40 in, and to ask about the racking load, and the beam span it was rated on.

Warehousing and storage is the trade where Rhode Island is most concentrated, at 0.8 times the national share of employment. A buyer in that trade will tend to ask the questions in the last column first.

The empty return

An illustration, not a forecast: if each of 40 warehouse establishments in Rhode Island sent back 1,200 empty pallets in a week, that would be 48,000 pallets. The table counts the 53 ft trailers that takes at three makers' published nestable figures, beside the 540 per trailer of a rackable.

Next door

Words on this page

Cross-docking

Moving freight from an inbound truck to an outbound one with little or no storage between.

Location quotient

A place's share of employment in a trade divided by the national share. Above 1 means the trade is more concentrated there than average.

Closed loop

A route where pallets return to the sender after delivery, so the empty trip is a standing cost.

Metropolitan area

A group of counties around an urban core, as the Census Bureau delineates it. Metro pages here follow those lines.

3PL

A third-party logistics company that stores and ships goods for other businesses.

Reefer

A refrigerated trailer or container.

Cruciform base

A base shaped like a plus sign under the pallet, which gives a stable footprint and slides well on conveyors.

Last mile

The final leg of a delivery, from a local depot to the customer.

Euro pallet

A 1200 by 800 millimetre pallet, about 48 by 31.5 inches, widely used in Europe.