What are the downsides to hauling a reefer

Delays at shippers and recievers, food warehouses & DCs are the worst for taking for ever and burning up your log book.
Appts at 3am and slaughter yard delays can run into days.

 

AMEN!! Food Warehouse's suck! Then in most cases you have to pay the lumper service to unload their ######! 3-5 hours in most cases waiting to be unloaded and checked in

 

The sound of a well running refer can put me to sleep at night pretty easily. On the flip side, one that hasn't been serviced in the last decade can be a nightmare. And every now and then you'll get one that is loud enough that it competes with your truck noise-wise while driving, and it can make for a really long day.

 

If you're running a larger fleet, other drivers are notorious for not doing good pretrips on trailers so you can inherit a trailer with a bad reefer unit, torn chute, not to mention the normal tire, brake, light issues that fleet trailers are famous.
This delays your load, often means you'll be repowered off of it since you spend the time to get it fixed.
Small fleets are much better.
As others said, shippers-receivers are horrible about getting you loaded/unloaded and detention pay is nearly impossible to get.
Loads are very often heavy and scaling, returning to shipper to rework can be an issue
On the plus side, loads are often longer (depending on company lanes).

 

Delays at shippers and recievers Actually you can experience delays with whatever you puull not just REEFERS

 

Pissing off sleeping drivers next to you when you pull in the truck stop at night with all that noisy racket you bring to the party....

 

I drive reefer trucks,
They make much noise,
all day long and all night long.

The wait times at shippers can
belong in the Guinness book of world
records.

A lot of the delivery times are
tough to make,
food places run late night and weeee hours of the morning.
You basically moving the food supply for the country
before the day begins,so when people get up the food is there.

You're like Santa....a big Food Santa

 

It's temperature sensitive freight. Like produce if you don't do your job properly you risk losing your whole load. I never lost a load but I was surprised to hear from my company how many drivers did.

You do a lot of night driving and delivering in the meat business. You might wait all day for a load and run, run, run. But your runs are usually longer depending on who you work for. It takes a lot of pig slaughters for a load of pig tails or a lot of chickens for a load of chicken livers. It's not like they warehouse fresh meat. They walk in one side of the building and come out the other side boxed up. If you don't have a dropped trailer there you can do some serious waiting. My truck was equipped like the Hilton so it didn't bother me.

I don't know if you can call all that downside because I thoroughly enjoy reefer. I guess the only thing that got my goat was going to pick up a trailer and the reefer was an old Carrier unit and no air slide!

Other than that it's same ol' same ol' stuff.

A good reefer driver is a runner and you might wait on some experience before you jump in there. But there are beginning reefer companies that haul easy stuff like frozen pizzas!

 

If you guys think todays reefer units are noisey good thing you were not trucking in the early 70's those old THERMO KING RATTLE BOXES made noise .