Should I sell my truck?

Personally I'm happy with how I did at landstar, just didn't love it. Maybe when I'm like 50 and I want to play trucker again and tell the newbies I've been trucking since before they were born that would be a good place to do it.

 

Thanks Dave Ramsey.

 

Are you the guy from the fort worth terminal way back last winter that was criticizing the load I selected, and then was sitting on the same God #### bench looking at his phone when i came back again 5 months later?

Or are you the guy that, as I was leaving to get the load, wanted to stop me and slow me down for 15 minutes to show me how to read fuel prices on the app.

...

As if it would go against landstar's wishes for me to have more than one good option in life.

"Look"

To be honest...

If you read the OP, I did say "my last 2 incidents..." one of which involved the trailer dept. Not an agent.

I also characterized landstar as a "culture of inconvenience"

So that should be a clue that my problems were not specifically just with agents.

However, let's look at what you are suggesting. You are telling me sitting there for 4 days should have simply been a way for me to find out one agent not to work with.

You could get your own authority to deal with those same exact situations. Why do you need to do it for 65% at half a star. What is so special.

Think about how much landstar scrutinizes potential drivers. You mean I'm going to sit and wait for 2 months to get into orientation, only to sit outside receivers for 4 days in order to learn which agents not to work with? Landstar, where your business depends on "Bob" who has never seen a map of the US and barely speaks English. Give me a break. Seems to me the agents could actually use some scrutinizing themselves.

Just to clarify for the ####mouths, agent "bob" in the example was not the same agent from the 4 day incident. But those types of agents are unbelievably somehow in landstars system. Why?

I had good agents I worked with. I learned the game fine. But #### ain't always the same muthafukka. If you see a good load for 3.91 a mile you probably take it. How you supposed to know that they botched the appointment and you're going to be ####ed when you get there.

No hand holding.
How many games do you want to play. And how far do you typically like to continue on a certain venture while regretting not putting your foot down. And not out of anger.

I'll be making my full disclosure on landstar on the landstar forum soon. Stay tuned.

 

Thanks everyone else for the thoughtful replies. We talkin bout life muthafukka.

 

Yeah exactly. That's pretty much what I said to myself sitting there. Might as well get my own authority if I want to do this. If I was gonna go through the challenge of weeding through landstar agents, I might as well get my own authority and try to find a direct customer. And then actually build something.

But hey, looks like I'm happy where I'm at now. For the time being at least.

Sometimes you need a figurative high ground vantage point and that is what my current situation will be.

 

As for the trailers. They've told me over the phone that the reason they don't have more trailers is because they don't want to spend money on extra trailers to be sitting around.

I was in Dallas when I needed a trailer. When I worked at prime they probably had about 500 trailers in Dallas. And every other city.

I can't figure out why you need to talk about cutting costs so much to the drivers who you charge 35% from.

You save on trailers.
You don't have dispatchers on your payroll like other companies do since you leave the responsibility to the drivers.
And you don't have to invest in any of the fancy computer programs other companies have to assign loads to trucks, because you have BCOs scouring the load board.

Maybe there insurance is through the roof? What exactly is in that 35%?

I wish it was a culture where they treated it as if the drivers "hire" landstar for 35%. In other words, I wish there was accountability for someone other than just the drivers.