I need help with this Covenant Trans. thing

Please tell me how it is that a company can make a profit from us when it costs $8,000.00 to fill a seat in an empty truck and if they do get $5000.00 as you have said, then it looks to me that they are $3000.00 in the hole.

 

I don't know how much replacing a driver costs. I will assume 8k is ballpark. It could be 2K. It could be 10K. My point is it doesn't matter anyway. If it mattered, companies would try a hell of a lot harder to keep their current drivers. They'd treat 'em as human beings and not lower life-forms or even dogs. I know stockholders would surely be ######## about trucks sitting around doing nothing but collecting dust. But some companies seem to love turnover.

When you start driving solo, work for a few weeks making your deliveries on time with no problems, and then get treated like you're a grease wrag, come back and talk. Hopefully you won't get the wrag treatment, as you'll choose your first company wisely.

 

Keep track of your miles and what you do on the road and you will see how they make back whatever money it cost them to hire you and then some.

As far as it costing them 8k? I doubt it. But even if true, it's probably at least partly tax deductible.

 

Not the easiest thing to do congrats

 

8,000 does sound high, however I will "try" to get an actual cost for you, but they look at orientation expense (meaning, bus ticket, hotel, persons training you and the "bonus" they pay you) Plus the physical expense and drug test and if you need eye glasses etc. I know they say it is expensive, but 8,000 sounds high, and again I will try to find out the "real" cost if that isn't the "real" cost. Again what I tell anyone and that goes for my kid, think about what you are going to do for # LEAST 30 days before doing it. So if you want a divorce think about it for 30 days and never make that decission while pms'ing or under allot of stress for other reasons. Normally you will go back to what you "said" you didn't want and you normally lose something by doing that. Many drivers I see leaving our company come back 40 days later and lose senority and yes senority means allot.

 

iv thought about this you have advertising costs mail dac costs drug tests
orientation instructors new cards students ie training school the list goes on and on but the single biggest expense is the loss of revenue from the truck not moving once another experienced driver vacates it.
if you have 3 trucks and 3 drivers quit and it takes a month to replace all 3 thats a 35 -75k hit in revenue lossed,assuming they were running only 2500 a week. Not to mention the lack of equipment availablity for customers not enough carriers look at it like this.
If they did you would c a carrier with great equipment hometime and payscale. but often carriers often even overlook simple driver convience's as a potential retention tool.
simply put most of them just dont get it.
and likly never will they could give to ##### about you just so longas its their when its suppose to be.

another example of this is shown from above poster driver quits changes his mind comes bac they reward them with losing senoirity thats lovely logs is that another recruiting tool. lol

 

but bac to topic i read about a court ruling in which a carrier won a desicion
that they could be stricter then the dot med standards had set forth.
so the thread starter sorry to say your probaly just better off going somewhere else
dont worry be happy

 

Yeah, unchecked, free-market turnover would cost a company a LOT more than just replacing a driver. The opportunity cost will dwarf that (supposedly) 8K and send a company into financial oblivion. Obviously there is much more to this turnover issue than is being reported, and I think it more or less revolves around the bigger companies being able to milk the government somehow.

Let me hypothesize some more about the white elephant that is turnover:

1. Bigger companies have a lot more trucks sitting around than what they need, as they've figured out how to milk a government sugar titty. Fixed costs on these rigs are either tax deductible or the companies get grants (subsidies) to make sure the idle trucks don't run them into the ground. The government may label the industry as 'critical', just like the agriculture industry is critical, and thus shower it with subsidies/grants. Profit margins are way too low to allow much turnover in trucking.

2. When a student enrolls in a school, his tuition is paid either through a government (welfare-to-work) retraining grant, or he pays for it out of his own pocket. And tuition at these schools isn't cheap. Tuition is outrageous because the government has driven up the cost by paying whatever the schools ask for. Big trucking companies control major shares in the schools, and may even own them outright. In a nutshell, it is in many a company's interest to show its vet drivers the door and hire students.

3. Companies claim there is a driver shortage so the government will keep providing the trucking industry with a sugar-titty. Claiming there is a driver shortage while treating current hired hands like dogs is as laughable as a truck full of idle trucks that do nothing but collect dust at companies for days and weeks on end. And these are the same companies that ##### and moan about low profits and low profit margins.

4. There is obviously an upper limit on how big the government titty is. Companies have figured out how big it is and just how much they can milk it. Companies milk it to the max, absolutely. And why not milk it? If the government pays me a jack for each student (in the form of a grant) who attends MY trucking school, I'll maximize the number of students I hire on. It's only rational. This is the reason why companies have a certain amount of turnover each week, month, and year. It's no more and it's no less. They're milking the titty as much as it can be milked.

There are still issues that need to be looked at, but we're slowly, slowly digging our way to the light of day with this turnover racket. And what a racket it is. If you want an example of a great fleece job, just take a close look at how trucking companies fleece the taxpayer. It's actually a thing of beauty, the way these companies have figured out how to use the fact they're in a 'critical' industry to get so much security in a random market economy, plus keep it all under wraps to boot. No matter how pretty it is, we call it "welfare" where I come from.

 

yeah i was coming more from a shareholders perspective on a loss of total revenue. their actual loss which would only be the lease payment insurance other mentioned recruitment costs.
i dont dought most large carriers have found a way to deduct the actual loss or a certain % as a deduction /business expense but it does make me wonder if theyv figured out how to deduct the revenue loss on top of it?
or at the very least show funny math on the 10k's and q's

with current fsc and a 6 mpg avg end fuel cost of about 1.2 somthing a gallon less with a more effiecient rig thiers no reason for turnover like this
treat em right give em what they need decent equipment hometime and pay that equation is just to complex for most carriers.

 

I just spent the weekend in Dallas visiting the Stevens Transport, HQ and terminal. Not one driver that I met there had anything bad to say about them and a few told me they started with them then left for greener grass and came back when it wasn't so green elseware. So, maybe ALL trucking companys are not rotten.