When Shipping Goes Horribly Wrong (Part One)

A Gaylord shipping container (or “bulk box”) is basically a giant cardboard box with a lid for shipping a bulk product on a pallet. Here’s what they look like:

We’ve seen them before at other warehouses, but it’s not how products are shipped to us. At least not normally.

A few weeks ago, another publisher’s distributor accidentally shipped 450 copies of their publication to us in a Gaylord.

And this is how they arrived:

The cherry on top of this mess were the copies with boot prints, which told us that the container had spilled open somewhere in transit:

The publisher was horrified to see how the copies arrived, of course, and quickly replaced them, but it was a surprising way to start the day!