How long can it take to unload a trailer?

Some places you can time with a watch.
Some places you can time with a calender.

 

I could not possibly disagree more with this statement.
Not all freight fit on pallets. Think along the lines of furniture, Equipment, and plants....

Pallets add weight and take up space.

30 pallets @ 62 pounds each works out to be about a ton...... or a little under 5% of max weight for a van/refer trailer. Shippers that load to max freight weight on the trailer do not want to use pallets.

I've also hauled freight that was too tall to sit on a pallet. Slip sheets and double stacked had about 2 inches of clearance on top.

like others have posted, the mixed commodities that need to be restacked to be used in a warehouse environment can take a considerable length of time to unstack and intake process. I had one trailer that had 3 stops, all three stops took over 8 hours. Each stop was about 10 pallets of candy that turned into over 100 pallets at each by the time it was ready to put away.. After everthing was restacked... We then had to wait on the receiving person to verify all the counts before the bills could be signed.

 

95 out of a 100 loads are palletized where I work hauling frozen and dairy and other chilled foods. And as long as you're not delivering to a grocer, the unload process is usually quick. Typically the count and office process side is the slowest process. However there is the occasional dock worker who moves slower than molasses in winter. But they're slow whether palletized or not.

 

(being absurd) Open the doors and hit the loading dock at 20 mph in reverse is a quick way to unload too.

 

Does anyone know of official statistics on how long loading and unloading takes?

 

I was at the infamous Kroger DC in Atlanta for the first time last week and it took all of about 30 minutes to get loaded and out of there believe it or not. Got to the transfer warehouse in Kentucky the next day and took 4 freakin hours to offload

 

Have never seen anything official......

But there is a reason one of the major retail places bumped the time to start paying out detention from 2hrs to 3 hrs on their contracts

 

I waited 6 hours 1 time for a single pallet with 4 drums on it. To be fair my partner at the time is not the easiest person to work with and I suspect if he just stayed in the truck it would have happened sooner.