The half pallet exists because shop aisles were not designed around grocery distribution. A full 48×40 deck in a retail aisle is a trip hazard, a merchandising problem and a space cost; a 48×20 half fits an aisle end and lets a store take a promotional quantity without surrendering a full footprint of floor.
The economics are different
Half pallets ship two-abreast in a trailer layer, which means no loss of cube. They reduce in-store handling because the unit arriving is the unit displayed. And they let a supplier send a quantity a store will actually sell through, rather than a pallet quantity chosen by the pallet.
Against that: they need A-grade material because customers see them, they are handled more often by people who are not forklift operators, and they are harder to source in volume because fewer circulate.
Where they come from
Two routes. Purpose-built new halves, jig-made with chamfered lead boards and a clean appearance, or re-cut halves made from sound recycled 48×40 decks. The re-cut route is cheaper and dramatically lower in embodied carbon; the trade-off is honest colour variation, which for some retail programmes is actually the aesthetic they want.
- 48 × 20 in — the standard retail half, aisle-end displays and DSD.
- 36 × 36 in — beverage and direct-store delivery routes.
- 24 × 20 in — quarter pallet, counter and end-cap displays.
- Custom branded — your mark burned into the deck, not printed.
- A grade for anything a shopper stands next to; #1 for back-of-store.
Branding without plastic
Burned marks last the life of the deck, survive handling, and do not add a non-wood material that complicates end-of-life. Printed or stickered branding on a pallet looks tired within two trips and contaminates the recycling stream. We burn, and we keep the die for repeat runs.
The returns question
Half pallets are easy to lose. They are light enough for one person to move and small enough to disappear into a back room. If you run a half-pallet programme, run it as a managed pool with a collection on the same trailer as the delivery, or plan to replace a meaningful share every season.
Written at the Meeks Blvd yard, St. Louis, and published on May 13, 2025. Markets and specifications move; if a figure here no longer matches what you are seeing, tell us and we will update it. Our model constants live on the Carbon Ledger.
How this was written
Drafted at the grading line from our own weighbridge records, line notes and customer correspondence. Figures quoted as ours are measured; figures quoted from the wider industry are labelled as estimates. Nothing here was written to rank for a search term, and we correct articles rather than quietly deleting them.
- Author
- Yard desk
- Published
- May 13, 2025
- Category
- Industry
- Reviewed
- Annually, with the model constants
- Corrections to
- sales@repalletshop.com
What to do with this
- Check the figures against your own invoices before acting on them.
- Ask us for the underlying scale tickets if you need audit evidence.
- Send the article to whoever owns your pallet spec — most of this is their decision.
- Disagree in writing. Several of these pieces exist because a customer corrected us.
How to cite
Yard desk, “Half pallets, quarter pallets and the retail floor”, Repallet Shop, May 13, 2025. repalletshop.com/blog/half-pallets-and-retail-displays