Ask HN: How did manufacturers ship CRT monitors back in the day? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How did manufacturers ship CRT monitors back in the day?

I was reading this article: https://int10h.org/blog/2021/04/safe-crt-monitor-shipping-5153-makes-it/

And it comes to me that shipping CRT monitors through commercial shipping companies is hazardous. How did companies such as IBM, HP, etc. ship new CRTs back in the day? I assume that because they were new monitors, buyers would have higher demand (no scratch for example). How did they manage to do that?

Or is it because shipping becomes more shitty (or to put up a better phrase, cost consciousness) nowadays? After all it seems to be easier to ship LCD ones than CRT ones.

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Ah, finally a topic I know something about. In general, monitors and TVs were NOT shipped by common carrier.

In the consumer realm, you went to the store to buy your TV or computer and brought it home in your station wagon, possibly bribing your neighbor with beer if you needed help with the big heavy boxes or just wanted some company for the ordeal.

In the business realm, companies like IBM and Dell had (and still do) their own carriers that they contract with because it gives them more control over every part of the delivery process.

That said, CRTs are not particularly fragile, they are just heavy and bulky. With enough Styrofoam, they ship just fine. I did it multiple times. It costs a lot more than you'd like, of course, but generally cheaper than a plane ticket.

I was actually surprised when I learned for the first time that Amazon sold big LCD televisions. They are MUCH more fragile than a CRT on account of being a big pane of thin glass that's not allowed to bend or twist at all. I have to imagine the shipping loss rate of these is somewhere in the single digits at least.

What I hated that time was exposure of the CRTs to magnetic fields while shipment. I remember I got some of them with a display like total crap then I had to travel back for replacement.. newer CRTs had degaussing built-in BTW

To add,

+ CRT's were usually shipped in bulk on pallets and that's how they would arrive in a big box store. So "This side up" and "Handle with Care" had meaning and until reaching store shelves forked jacks and lifts were used. Unlike today when a CRT will mostly be moved by hand alongside unfragile goods by someone who isn't paid to care.

+ Crating a used CRT is time consuming and requires more effort and experience than most sellers are likely to commit or have. The margins just aren't there when selling to price sensitive customers. It's probably $100 worth of work on top of the cost of shipping and whose going to pay that?

For reference, manufacturers have engineers designing their shipping packages.

What everyone else said, but especially, they shipped in boxes designed for them, with thick styrofoam designed for them, and typically in a plastic bag so when styrofoam flaked off, it wouldn't attach to the monitor.

New plastic would take a couple bumps without showing anything, but a properly packed box will transfer mostly all the forces it experiences through the box and not to its contents. Tight fitting foam with reinforced corners prevents internal movement of the monitor. There's risk of getting the sides poked in with a fork lift, but when that happens, the damage is obvious and the recipient will refuse delivery if the carrier tries. You can reinforce the faces of the box too, but monitors weren't valuable enough for that.

I would throw this into the mix. No new CRTs have been made in a very very very long time. The plastics on any of them are much more brittle than when they were new. Shipping one today will be way harder than shipping one when they were new.

They shipped UPS. Some 21” models were too heavy and required freight or some expensive service. They’d be in a big box with foam and mostly ship fine.

People weren’t ordering individual rolls of toilet paper online then, so you weren’t getting killed on dimensional weight like today.

At a store, iirc, we’d get anywhere from 18-24 displays on a pallet, depending on size. The original iMac shipped 9 to a pallet iirc.

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