This shipper makes a tempting sounding offer on the load boards. Maryland to Portland, OR....paying $5300 to the truck. Sounds nice.

Never mind that the load requires a total of 15 stops, with the schedule spread out over a full WEEK, even when they knew there was a TEAM on the truck. The guy we dealt with on the phone wasn't exactly friendly, either....but then, it's the Northeast, so we didn't expect too much.

They have you make several pick-ups before you can even go to the Maryland warehouse to load. What you pick up isn't what you'll be hauling, you just bring it to the warehouse where they unload it, sort it all out, and re-load it onto the appropriate trucks. Once you make it to the warehouse, expect to sit for 8-12 hours.

Finally, we were loaded & on our way to Portland via Denver, CO. They had all our stops, schedules, phone numbers, etc...in order, on a piece of paper. Everything went smoothly until we got to Portland.

Now listen closely- this becomes important later on. One of the stops to Albertsons near Troutdale, CANCELLED on us but nobody thought to TELL US. Thankfully, WE took the initiative to call the reciever and see if we could unload it early since we were at a stop 3 miles away, but our appointment for Albertsons was for the next morning, and they had us going 40 miles into Washington before coming all the way back to Albertsons. Albertsons had NO clue who we were.

Called H&M Bay....and they said, "Oh, yeah....that pallet was mistakenly left off your load. That stop was cancelled. We figured you knew?" NO....because no one CALLED US TO TELL US. Thankfully we thought to call. Finding out about the cancellation early saved us a 50 mile trip! Thanks for nothing, H&M.

So 3 days and 10 stops in Portland later, we were finally finished and free to proceed with our lives.

Until the time came to settle up with H&M Bay and get paid for the load. No dice. Seems the CANCELLED STOP...the one that H&M Bay was AWARE OF....the one that THEY FORGOT TO LOAD ON OUR TRUCK.....

....IS NOW BEING CHARGED TO US. They're saying the pallet of fish or whatever has "disappeared"....they claimed at the time they were sending it on another truck, but some moron probably simply lost track of it and they're trying to cover their butts by charging it to OUR COMPANY!!

So this nice $5300 dollar load has turned into a load that didn't even pay for the fuel to haul it. Obviously, we are disputing the claim, but from what I have heard from some other folks, this is par for the course for H&M Bay. Bunch of crooks they are. Wouldn't haul for them in a million years if they were the last bit of freight left in the country. Seems they serve only gourmet and high-end food suppliers, hopefully they'll be the first to go under when the economy tanks and people stop spending so much money on fancy fish.

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Us & The Dogs

-I travel a lot; I hate having my life disrupted by routine. ~Caskie Stinnett

I can concur with most of everything you said. we hauled a load last month for them with 12 stops on it winding up in the LA area. but without going into a lot of my details, basically, what happened with us was that they did not schedule enough time to legally drive from stop1 to stop 2. They didn't "have a load manifest" for me until my driver was well on his way. Even tho, my driver still arrived within a "reasonable" amount of time and was not a real problem. The problem was the next stop the he arrived to early and was refused because H&M never confirmed that appt time. So that has toi wait til the next day and threw everything back a day. Then when arriving in LA on Fri instead of Thursday, 2 of those stops do not receive on Friday and waited til Monday delaying my guy for 3 more days. h&M would not pay any detention time because they laid it on us because we had a reefer problem earlier in the week. That had nothing to do with any delay because we got caught up with no other problems until we hit that unconfirmed appt stop when everything snowballed from there. My other point to them was that when things did change, they never contacted our dispatch either yet they say they "left messages" for our driver which I countered with if that was a problem, they should call our office as well. Sorry to go into the details I said i wouldn't.
But a note for others that may consider pulling for them, beware of these "retieval loads" that they require. Our paperwork says that they charge you $400 if you don't do a retieval for them. This will probably not be discussed over the phone as well as others things. Just make sure you have a load manifest with all pu and del times on the confirmation as well as other things discussed, ie lumper reimbursement etc. i will not say that this is a common practice of their's but next time, if their is a next, things will be done with more scrutiny, to say the least.