LTL a good local option?

City delivery is home everyday.
Linehaul could be home daily, every other day or gone all week. Every LTL is run differently.

 

With your reefer experience, you might want to consider working for grocery store chains, or food service providers such as Performance Food Group, and Sysco. The jobs pay $90K to $110K annually, Most are home every day but the job is very labor intensive and you must be customer service oriented or you wont last. Another market to investigate for home daily, would be specialty gas hauling, liquid oxygen, carbon dioxide, nitrogen and other cryogenic gases hauled in tankers for hospitals, steel mills, chemical plants and Pharmaceuticals.

Truck Driver Jobs | Air Products

CDL Truck Driver Jobs | Airgas

Sysco Careers

Drive With Performance Foodservice

 

CAUTION: Procede carefully....with those local, home-daily gigs.

Cryogenics, & fuel-hauling: You'll start out doing nights, weekends, and holidays. Shifts are mostly seniority-based. Your schedule with thus be reversed from everyone else's that are back home. Very skimpy PTO & sick leave, for your first year. You'll slip-seat a rig with another driver; said driver may (or may not) be a pig. Also: driver-facing cameras. Nazi gestapo-level safety dept mentalities (I've been chided for having a soft drink in my hand while driving! It was summertime, in Florida. People--hellll-looo!!!).

LTL: You'll most likely start out (in many cases) on "extra board"...which basically means "on call", for line-haul duty. You may stay on the "extra board" for months, or even years. Very unpredictable income during that time; poor sleep patterns, too. LTL has been laying off lately in some markets/locations, as freight has slowed down there. Daily P&D is probably different, but that has its own share of nightmares, as you are dealing directly with customers, every day. Because of the layoffs--things there for the foreseeable near-term look dicey.

Food service/delivery companies: The money is good, to great--and you're home daily, in most cases. But the work is very labor intensive (to sugar-coat it mildly), and you will earn e-v-e-r-y penny. Lots of co-workers with workplace injuries, and/or limping. Gee....I wonder why? Basically, it's mostly a meat-grinder. Pure "shuttle" positions aren't nearly as intensive.

Pick your poison....

--Lual

 

I asked to be on extra board and refused to bid on runs. Stayed on extra board for 3 or 4 years before leaving the company. I was the top paid driver every year because of staying on extra board. The other drivers complained to the terminal manager about me refusing to bid on runs and said it wasn't fair that I was making the most money, yet low on the seniority ladder.

 

It could be tough to find a job in LTL right now, with it being the slow season and people worried about the economy. Normally things pick back up in the spring, so you might find more job listings in a few months.

It's possible that some drivers are running up against their clock, but mostly they are just trying to complete their day and go home. It's also courteous to be on time to a meet and swap, so your meet driver isn't sitting around waiting.

Local P&D drivers are all home daily. With linehaul it varies by company, but all of them have home daily options with enough seniority. Of the drivers who do stay out, 99% of them stay in hotels. Most of the sleeper trucks are team operations.

 

What market are you in?

To answer your question, based on my experience,
1. Not super tight. But you should not dilly dally.

2. Yes

There are two sides of LTL, P&D, and linehaul. P&D pays less but works daytime. Linehaul works nights and offers more $$$. There are some daytime linehaul runs depending on the outfit but those go to the 20+ year guys.

 

it can be good, it can be bad. alot of it has to do with management of the location you work at. every places has different styles of managing things. i seen alot of variety. and there is alot of rules employers must obey but it is unrealistic to expect full compliance. so each one has varying degrees of bad and uncompliancy from the employers end. the employees may feel the brunt of this and harm them and their careers. this is stuff has little to do with the job itself too. it could be on the surface a good place, but then you find out whatever management there breaks alot of rules on their end. could be all kinds of things, high harassment, sexual harassment, discrimination, cutting corners on safety and health for more profits. there is a very long list of things that a potentially on the surface good place to work at can become pretty bad pretty quick and it doesn't take much.

in general ltl is pretty solid, option though.