Pallets in Southeast Memphis: Shelby Drive to Lamar Avenue

BOX 01The belt, as brokers draw it

Memphis industrial brokers split the market into Northwest, Northeast, Southwest, Southeast, DeSoto County, Fayette County and Marshall County submarkets, per an Avison Young market report. Southeast is the stretch along Shelby Drive and Lamar Avenue.

Listings place buildings at the corner of Shelby Air Drive and East Shelby Drive, along Lamar Avenue near its junction with I-240, and in business parks beside the airport. They are mostly big boxes: distribution buildings, cross-docks and truck terminals.

BOX 02Lamar Avenue, one road with two names

U.S. 78 enters Memphis from Arkansas on I-55, leaves it onto E.H. Crump Boulevard, becomes Lamar Avenue and runs southeast to the Mississippi line, per Wikipedia. The route is 15.9 miles inside Memphis, has interchanges with I-55 and I-240, and was being widened from four to six lanes in segments from 2018. Across the state line the same road is US 78 into Olive Branch.

That makes Lamar the freight spine of the district: a trailer leaving a Southeast Memphis dock is on a road that runs straight to the Mississippi line, where the DeSoto County fulfillment belt begins. Pallets move along it in both directions.

BOX 03What the docks collect

• Big-box distribution: inbound 48 x 40 stringers from many shippers, so a mixed load every week.
• Apparel and footwear distribution: apparel moves on clean pallets, so a Grade A pile is the usual find.
• 3PL warehousing: customers' pallets pass through, so the pile is a blend of everything.
• Truck terminals: broken pallets from loads transferred between trailers.

The pile is mixed by nature, so the useful move is to say so. A dock can sell the sound 48 x 40s as Grade B and clear the rest; see mixed loads and recurring pickup.

BOX 04Where it fits

Southeast Memphis is the largest dock cluster that is also the closest to the airport, so air and ground freight meet here. A request from this belt can name any of its ZIP codes. For the bigger picture of what these buildings do, read distribution and fulfillment.

BOX 05Whose pallets are they?

Third-party logistics buildings hold other companies' goods, and sometimes other companies' pallets. Before a 3PL dock describes a pile as something to sell or clear, it should know who owns the wood. A pallet that arrived under a customer's product may belong to a pool, a program or the customer, and a buyer will ask.

The simplest approach is to split the pile into stacks that are clearly yours, stacks that belong to a customer and stacks whose owner is unknown. Only the first stack goes in a sell or clear request. Writing that sentence into the request saves a delay later.

BOX 06An example of the arithmetic, for illustration

Suppose a cross-dock building turns 30 trailers a week and each carries 48 x 40 pallets loaded lengthwise at 26. That is 780 pallets through the dock in a week. If one pallet in ten comes off the floor damaged, 78 are cores or scrap. The numbers are invented to show the method, not to describe any building.

The same method works for any dock: trailers a week, times pallets per trailer, times a damage fraction you can observe. The pallets-per-trailer guide shows where 26 and 30 come from.

BOX 07Roads to remember

Shelby Drive and Raines Road run east to west across the belt, and Lamar Avenue runs northwest to southeast. The belt's four ZIP codes cover a large area, and two buildings in one ZIP code can be many minutes apart.

BOX 08What brokers see and miss

Broker market reports and listing pages divide Memphis industrial space into submarkets. Brokers describe buildings for lease or sale, not every building in use, so the picture tilts toward large, leasable buildings and may leave out owner-occupied plants.

The length of US 78 inside the city comes from Wikipedia's route article.

BOX 09Sorting a Southeast Memphis pile by the door it came through

In a building with many dock doors, piles form at particular doors. Pallets from the inbound doors are mixed and varied; pallets from the outbound doors are the building's own.

If the building handles both parcel and freight, the two flows may leave different piles. Parcel docks tend to produce uniform stock; freight docks produce a wide variety.