NOTE: A Blind Shipment is a shipment for which:
- The shipper thinks the shipment is going to a certain location, whereas it is really going to different location; or,
- The receiver thinks the shipment came from a certain location, whereas it really came from a different location.
A “Double Blind Shipment” is a shipment for which:
- Both the shipper and the receiver are in the dark, regarding the true origin and destination of the shipment.
ISSUE
You want to make a shipment, and it is important to you that it be blind to one or both parties.
Your reasons for the subterfuge are you own, but typically blind shipments occur when a third party is brokering a commodity that is supplied by one party and sold to a second party: the broker wishes to maintain the confidentiality of the supplier and / or the receiver.
CAUTION: Blind shipments are only successful if everybody keeps the secret, and when a blind shipment is set up, nobody knows the identities of all the “everybodys”.
Moreover, each of the “everybodys” has to remember to keep the secret, even in the face of probing questions. To keep the secret, each of the “everybodys” has to do things that are outside their normal activities (e.g., drivers have to prepare dummy Bills of Lading), and some of the “everybodys” may not even know there is a secret to protect. That is a big ask.
There is also the matter or preparing and submitting knowingly incorrect legal documents to Customs on trans-border shipments: Copper Run will not be part of that.
As a result, no matter how well you set up a blind shipment, the secret can and does on occasion get out.
And that is before anybody looks at the labels and manufacturer’s marks, or Googles a name that inexplicably shows up on the cartons!
So, in making a blind shipment, you’re a really asking the driver to keep your secret secure, in a situation where the driver who pick-ups the shipment and the driver that delivers it are two different people, and neither has a full under stand of what is secret and what is not, and who is in the know and who is not.
At the end of the day, most blind shipments are not really blind: While we will do our best to protect your secret, we make no guarantee that it will be successfully protected by all of those involved in a blind shipment, nor do we accept any liability in the event that the secret is revealed.
ACTION
- Tell us that you want to make a blind shipment.
- We will take the details from you, and will do our best to stress to the carrier that the shipment is blind. It is usually necessary for the carrier to prepare one or two ‘dummy’ bills of lading to protect shipper and/or receiver names.
EXPLANATION
Blind shipments serve an important purpose, but they require numerous people who have ‘no skin’ in the game to do non-standard tasks in non-standard ways for the confidentiality to be maintained. And the false facts that often used to support a blind shipment often fly in the face of common knowledge, so lie provided to for the driver’s to repeat is unsustainable.
However, blind shipments are usually successful, not because the original secret is successfully protected, but because the person from whom the secret is being kept is discreet enough to know to keep secret that fact that he/she knows the original secret.
TYPICAL RESOLUTION
Despite everybody’s best efforts, every blind shipment carries the risk that it will not remain blind.
Some blind shipments do in fact remain blind, but it is our understanding that, one way or another, most people have a pretty good idea who is on the other end of their shipment.