Standard Size File Boxes – What The Hell Does That Mean?

Long ago, after getting out of the Navy, when I was just starting college (right after my time delivering kegs of beer for 6 months), I had a job working at the County of San Diego Department of Weights and Measures .

This County Department is in charge of certifying any sort of device that weighs or measures for which a vendor then charges a customer. These devices range from gas pumps , taxi meters , grocery store checkout stands (you know how they weigh your vegetables), and recycling center scales … just to name a few.

In my opinion, this is an extremely valuable service the County performs. It’s great to know that someone is making sure that when you pump a gallon of gas that an actual gallon of gas is g0ing into your tank!

Charging by weight, however, would involve yearly certification of your scale by the County and a yearly fee. It’s not all that much, everything considered, but it does add another layer of cost when charging by weight…

Now back to shredding…

The shredding industry has basically side-stepped the whole charging by weight deal by either charging by unit of time ($$ per hour or minute) or by volume.

Enter stage right the Standard Size File Box…

Since most folks already have their stuff stored in standard size file boxes (boxes that measure 10″ x 12″ x 15″) , why not just charge by the box?

This eliminates the need of having certified scales on all the shredding trucks.

As a side note, even if scales are certified, customers would still have questions about scale accuracy. (Again, I answered a multitude of complaint phone calls at the County.) I’ve found that most people do not have a great eye for estimating quantities – especially in pounds. Trust me, it’s not easy.

To make a long story short… we leave it up to the customer to fill standard size file boxes the best they can. Once the customer is happy with their boxes, all that is left is to count and then we can provide an accurate quote and the customer know what they will be paying.

If you don’t have your documents in Standard Size File Boxes, then we prorate accordingly…

And, to clarify the point even further, I put together a little video: