Lumpers - are they needed

I had a pizza delivered to my house last week. Told the driver he needs to pay me $10 for the fact that he delivered it on time and safely.



I starved that night.

 

GREAT analogy!!

God bless every American and their families! God bless the U.S.A.!

 

that's why they will only accept cash or com. tch. t checks ect they are just as good as cash and can run under the table and escape being taxed. sliding in under the tax loophole.

Big problem with lumpers is although brokers know about it ahead of time they never tell you and it isn't on your rate con so you don't know till you get there. Normally to take the headache out of it and be sure i always get paid for my lumper fee I try not to ever pay out of pocket on the promise of reimbursement cause we all know how brokers are sometimes. so I just call the broker and get an express code and just send them the receipt with my invoice so much easier.

ran into one that wouldn't do that for me never told me there was a lumper till i got there and didn't have the cash cause i don't carry cash on me. it was a nightmare. They let me leave with a gate pass and no paperwork. So i had to drive 10 miles to a truckstop get cash from atm then drive 10 miles back and of coarse since i didn't have a load they already took it off I wasn't allowed back in the gate i had to park on the street and walk 2 miles to pay them and get my paperwork.. Never again will i book anything with PLS again.

 

Forget about lumpers I was making a delivery in laredo of coarse nothing but Mexicans on the docks there wasn't even a lumper service there job was to unload my truck they worked for the company i was delivering too. dude had a tip jar duck taped to the forklift when I was done he expected a tip. I was like for what doing what are are being paid to do I utterly refused.

Another time one of the Mexican dock workers said pallets needed to be re stacked and i had to pay for it i was like sure when it came time to pay they only accepted cash I had to pay the dock worker directly which he stuffed into his pocket and then they said I don't get a receipt. thats sounded pretty shady and often wondered if he was even authorized to charge me extra.

 

Did you bring this situation to your employer's attention? Tipping the dock workers? This outfit sounds quite shady.

HOLY MOSES!!

God bless every American and their families! God bless the U.S.A.!

 

yes as it turns out I am also the employer so yeah I got the message real quick wont be taking another load from them.

 

Speaking of Laredo TX, which might as well be Tijuana, I dropped at a warehouse there (filthy dirty place with holes in the dirt parking lot out back big enough to eat side skirting) where the lumper fees were CASH ONLY. That just reeks of corruption, and our beautiful U.S. currency quickly zipping straight south about 3 miles.

 

Blackshack46, you left out this part: " . . . and let me go leave a big mess in the trunk of your car, after I insisted you pay money to have it cleaned out before putting my pizza in there."

 

Yes we need lumpers.

I am old enough to share a little history. There was a trucking company on Pulaski Highway (US 40...) in the Baltimore city limits just a few blocks south of the 95/895 old tunnel split. This was a massive building surrounded in the lowest ground level by about 50 docks on each of it's three sides not facing the street. The bottom level is a huge basement so to speak that does NOTHING but transfer freight into truck trailers going to say Freehold New Jersey today. Everything is collected from all the trailers from everywhere by hand and stacked into that one trailer going to Jersey, Freehold might have one, Brunswick one or two and so on.

That entire facility was demo'ed a few years ago, I think a big box store owns the property now. I'll have to take a look on Google earth view.

This was back in the 60's Any teenager in highschool would show up and do lumping to earn money. Eventually these teenagers got old enough to go get licenses and become drivers.

The one thing changed in the 60's called Pallets. These were begun to be used. And were widely adopted. The rest as they say is history. Not much lumping needed anymore really. A certain amount sure. But nothing like break bulk.

Containers were the other invention. Load a box one time in overseas, put it on the ship, run it to USA, plop the box onto a truck and deliver. Done. Before that, everything again was break bulk by hand, alot of problems involved theft, black market, racketerring etc Especially of rum and other liquors etc.

Fast forward to the 80's I would lump loads onto the floor in the reefer in the morning, drive the rest of the day and half the night, nap and lump the load off at hunts point. 48000 pounds of butter. Packed in 15 pound boxes, stacked something like 6 layers to the pallet, 2000 pounds per. I forget the exact combinations, it's been many years for me. But anyway. Do this every day in the morning. Unload, drive to Baltmore, reload next morning deliver in NYC hunts point 5 to 6 days a week with a break between saturday and sunday for laundry etc in the 78 truckstop in Jersey. That old 76 was my home base for everything NY. It was a great, great old truckstop for it's time. The police in that town was nazis but as long you had a legal parking spot and did not have to pay for it (Fueling etc) all is well. I Actually made the police wait 2 hours over dinner while parked illegaly before collecting my 70 dollar ticket and a bunch of bad words. I paid that too. Watching 5 policemen stand around my tractor across the street and deliberately eating a proper full 4 course meal and a coffee plus smoke to finish. That was worth the 70 dollars I say...

Anyway back to lumping.

No body in the food grocery business, such as Associated Grocers in St Louis, Save A Lot in the NE and Stop and Shop etc. All of them were lumping. They charged 60 to 100 dollars for a whole trailer load. Money not paid by dispatchers. They wanted to only pay 40 dollars for the truck load and no lumper will take that. Worse yet, organized lumper offices would band together in a sort of a false front company and charge the trucking company or driver the lumping fees which jumped to 120-150.

I understand they charge 300 plus today.

Walmart came along later. I learned very fast NEVER to deliver to a Walmart DC live unload. They take forever, Denver comes to mind. I waited 19 hours to get unloaded and 65 dollars on the comcheck paid to them, and taken out of my pay. (Some bs trucking company rules about reimbursement carefully structured like a freaking three ring circus to shuffle the reciepts which get lost and charge back to you. Yep the driver. You are now out 65 dollars times however many loads you deliver into walmart.

And you wonder why they like their low prices. Parasites I say. Actually predators.

In the beginning I lumped. No problem. Later on in my 30's my body began to break down from that kind of work. For example McCormick Spices, the little 4 dollar container of black pepper plus 6000 more of it's friends in all the variety of spices, something like 150 different kinds front to back of the trailer. Those went to Horseheads Sysco in Elmira NY on the floor of the trailer. You drop it off at McCormick in Hunt Valley Maryland over the weekend so they can load it. YOU get to sit there in Sysco unloading while checking with a pencil every single UPC code, and item barcode against the general printout of the entire load which is a spread sheet about 5 inches thick in your hands. That takes a day. They finally take pity on me and send in 6 more souls to help count and check and mark off the stupid little things. I cannot to this day buy a freaking 5 dollar spice something in the store of that brand without doing a slow burn. But I did it. And that's the fact jack.

And I finally in my 40's spent 4 blessed hours lumping 12 inbound trailers into 8 store bound trailers in Searcy AR, at the DC there. They have this system where you have 2 dock bosses sitting on the gd desk like Lords barking orders into a crew of 8 running around with boxes. They give a stupid company cheer and motivational briefing as if you are going off to war and assault the enemy hill or something. It's utter BS how the young crew ate that *&^% up.... If you think I am old and BITTER... why not.

Anyway after 4 hours moving 12 trailers into 8, the Lords at the desk told me to go bye bye, Im finished now because they wont pay me more than the 8.50 per hour (Times 4 hours) against the budget for the temp agency (Which is probably 16 dollars a hour for my soul.... times 4...)

To this day I seethe when I consider how in the world I fit 12 trailers into 8 and left two unfinished when told to get off the property, Im too expensive to keep working the rest of the night. All of it for what 40 #### dollars.

And you wonder why I worship drop and hook trucking now. 10 minutes, papers please and finished and rolling. And none of that Grocery bs either. World class million dollar medicine load unloaded by them in about 20 minutes, reloaded with bales of cardboard back to Memphis. Payroll is more than I can spend on a friday night. So it piles up.

And I take some of those medicines now for a spine blown and a rib cage destroyed by the lumping. It;s nothing they can fix medically. But you know what? When you are young and strong, anything is possible. Even lumping.

But 12 trailers into 8 for 40 dollars... I was the stupid one, not walmart.