Abilene Motor Express....A New Place To Call Home

My 85 inch tv and Hulu await!

 

Word on the street is that we had 10 Hill-Phoenix/Family Dollar loads left unassigned last weekend, making them all late.

Normally, those loads are planned with considerable room for error. For those who don't know, Hill-Phoenix is Abilene's biggest customer. And Family Dollar is HP's biggest customer. So they really don't like those loads being late. The listed delivery time is always 6:00am, even though the contractors are rarely there at 6:00am. It's not uncommon for me to arrive at 6:00am and not have anybody show up until 8:00am.

But when those loads don't get assigned to a driver at all, then it doesn't matter how early the listed delivery time is.

Apparently there was a come-to-Jesus meeting in ops about it, with a very firm "or else" attached to the end. I'm on hometime, but I have already been pre-planned for Monday. I was given my choice of HP loads, and instructed to arrive on-site the day before and park there overnight. These instructions apparently being handed down from AKJ himself. So you can probably expect some increased micromanagement on those loads for a while.

 

This is what you get when hiring non trucking people, pay them a lowball hourly rate, train them with a few days of the do’s and don’t, then set them free. In house training? It’s like the monkeys running the zoo. The last true trucking person hired was Don H. Just look at the abortion called West Memphis. You get what you pay for.

 

Where I'm at now, they keep taking on more and more work. The folks upstairs keep patting themselves on the back, "look at all this new work and customers we've picked up!"

Problem is, they don't have the manpower to support what they have now, much less more work. So the days get longer, more hectic for those of us moving product, and they can't figure out why people are calling in sick, not showing up, and are generally in a bad mood. They can throw money at it, but that's not the ultimate solution. I'm 62, and I want to work less, not more these days. And 12-13 hr days grows old quickly!

 

Sounds like they need drivers. Um, quality drivers, that is. Maybe if they’d get in line with other carriers and pay decent, they might get/keep some drivers. Of course, there’s still the circus that is operations, which again might be somewhat helped by better pay to attract quality. I heard about the recent s show out in W Armpit along with a lot of others little (and big) things since I left. Just my 2 cents as I am in no way an astute business person, but usually when there are that many issues in an organization, shouldn’t you start looking at it from the top downwards instead of from the bottom upwards?

 

In the military the best advice I always gave every new Lieutenant was to take care of your men and they will take care of you. The same holds true out here in the civvie world, take care of your employees and treat them good and they will return the same. If you look around, the companies that have no or very low turn over and not a lot of issues are the ones that pay their employees good and treat them good and listen to them and make changes when needed and don't force then to do stuff they aren't comfortable with.

 

Hit the road at 6:00am to go pick up the preload over at Hill-Phoenix, only to discover it ain't ready. According to dispatch, HP is 20 trailers behind. Trailer probably won't be ready until sometime this afternoon. So now I'm sitting around burning daylight waiting for the load planners and my DM to get to work so I can try and get a load that's actually ready to roll.

 

What is Hill Phoenix?

 

They’re the biggest manufacturer and supplier of refrigeration units for every supermarket chain and bodega in the US and Canada.