My New Adventures At Beacon Transport

So here's the low down on Beacon Transport. They have a nice steady customer base. We only have about 10 customers. But they managed to keep us running steady. The people are fairly nice. I told you guys I would let you know how it went and give you an honest opinion. So now for the things I have found that I consider bad.

Dispatch does not answer the phone. Ever!!! You leave a voicemail and they will notify you by Qualcomm if you're lucky. Someday.

There are no paid holidays.

The driver does a lot of free work. Our customers are a major pain in the ###. Almost every customer will require the driver to sweep out the trailer no matter what. I took a brand new trailer to Bridgestone the other day and they made me sweep it out. I have never swept out so many trailers my life. I understand there will be times when you will need to sweep a trailer such as when you are picking up food products. Or the trailer is just nasty. But here you will sweep a trailer out whether it is clean or not. Whether it is food or not. The customer will not load the trailer until you sweep it out. Now here comes the really bad part. When you deliver John Deere products. They nail wooden blocks behind all four wheels to keep them from Rolling. When you deliver them to the dealers. You are required to remove all of those blocks and pull out all of the nails. 32 nails in all. Now before you say stop being lazy and do your job. I want you to know this is very time consuming not to mention extremely hard on someone with lower back problem such as myself. It takes an average of 30 to 45 minutes to get a trailer ready for the next load.

The trucks really suck. There is just nothing about these trucks that are driver friendly. There is no satellite radio. There is no fridge. There is no TV. There is no GPS. The sleeper is small. 70% of the trailers are complete junk. The metal plate at the back doors is bent in almost all of them. And I mean really bent. You will have lots of fun opening and closing the doors believe me

The insurance is terrible. At $62 per week for the driver and a $5,000 deductible.

There are no bonuses of any kind for the driver. No safety bonus. Performance bonus. No Christmas bonus. The check you earn is the money you will make.

There is no pre-planning. Once you send an empty call you will have to wait for your next load. They burnt three and a half hours of my clock yesterday waiting for my next load.

So there you have it. The lowdown on Beacon transport. So if anyone is considering coming to Beacon...RUN!!

 

I knew some of it yes. But I can live with the truck. And I'm here for at least six months so I'll deal with the rest for the time being.

 

Lol. No more CT for me. I'm going to try to stick it out here for the next 6 months if my back will let me. They have pretty good miles and pretty good pay. But the customers are complete pain. They just don't do enough to keep their drivers comfortable on the road. But on the bright side they don't micromanage you like cargo did. And I have never heard anything good about Big G Express.

 

1150 from Oklahoma then 880 from SC to MI. Not a bad week. Haven't had to sweep a trailer in 3 days!!! I did buy a long crow bar for my nail pulling adventures. Kudos to them to getting me home a day early. I don't think it's a bad company. Just needs improvement and upgrades.

 

Only 1300 miles for last week. This week is not looking much better. The problem I am seeing is that it is extremely hard to get a new load on Saturday or Sunday. Saying that the load planners do not work on the weekends.