Ask an operations manager what pallets cost and you get a purchase price. Ask what the pallet fleet costs and you usually get a pause.
The pause is the tell. Operations buy pallets constantly, track them rarely and never depreciate them in anyone's head the way a forklift or a run of racking is. A forklift gets a line in the capital budget and a name against its service schedule.
A pallet gets ordered when the yard runs low, and after that nobody's job is to know where it went.
The cycle nobody is costing.
A pallet earns its keep by cycling: out full, back empty, out again. The number only becomes uncomfortable when you follow one pallet through a year instead of counting the fleet as a static figure.
Take a pallet at $18 delivered, as an example. One that cycles eight times before it is damaged, lost or never returned costs about $2.25 a trip. One that cycles twice costs $9 a trip. Same purchase price, four times the difference.
Most businesses cannot say which pallet they are running, because the reorder is counted and the cycle is not.
Where they go.
Losses cluster in a few predictable places. Pallets that leave with a delivery and were never scheduled to come back. Pallets swapped one for one with a customer's stock and never reconciled. Pallets broken down for scrap timber by a yard hand nobody told otherwise.
Pallets stacked three deep behind something else, on site on paper and lost until a stocktake finds them by accident.
None of that is dramatic, which is why it is expensive. A dramatic loss gets noticed and fixed. A slow leak never crosses the line where it becomes somebody's problem.
Two mistakes that feed each other.
The first is treating supply and recovery as separate jobs, usually because different people handle them. Supply gets reviewed on price. Recovery, if it happens at all, is nobody's line item.
The second is waiting for the yard to get bad enough. By the time a backlog is stacked against a fence or blocking a dock door, it has already spent months as value doing nothing. Timber that could have been recovered, resold or recycled has been taking up space and irritating everyone who walks around it.
What changes the number.
The businesses that get this right do not necessarily spend less on pallets. They stop losing the value they have already paid for. Whoever sources your pallets should also answer for what happens to the ones you have finished with. It is the same asset at two points in its life, not two purchasing decisions.
It also means knowing what is in the yard. If nobody can say whether the stack is mostly reusable stock or mostly broken timber, that gap decides whether recovery is worth doing at all. Most operations have never looked.
A few photos of the stack are usually enough to put a value on it. Send them and we will tell you what it is worth and what recovery would cost.
Pallets building up in the yard.