DANANG, VIETNAM – Here’s an unusual sight from today’s morning shopping excursion. No, not the construction site… those are seemingly everywhere around Vietnam.
What’s unusual about this scene is the row of palletized building bricks. Neatly stacked on wooden pallets and wrapped in plastic for easier handling. We don’t normally see that.
The typical construction site scenario around here goes like this:
A large stake-bed truck pulls up to the site, piled to the top with red clay bricks, neatly stacked right on the truck bed.
Several laborers, who rode in on top of the load, hop off the truck and drop the stake sides. They then proceed to unload the thousands of bricks and neatly re-stack them on the ground… brick by brick!
And since the bricks had been stacked directly on the truck bed, you can probably guess how they originally got there.
That’s right; the laborers back at the factory (probably the same ones who rode out with the load) stacked them there… brick by brick.
So Vietnam scores extra points for “full” employment.
Efficiency? Not so much.
This is so funny! I’ve been walking by those pallets of bricks for a couple of weeks and thought the plastic was there to keep them from falling on me. (Silly thought, I know.) It didn’t occur to me how unusual it is to see pallets. Usually I see piles of bricks – not stacked at all – just heaped.
Sadly, all those bricks on pallets mean fewer jobs for unskilled workers. On the flip side, however, they now need skilled forklift drivers and semi-skilled pallet makers!