mercer transportation

If he was short on hours.. He should not have booked the load.. What part of that do you not understand?

 

He shouldn't have taken the load if he didn't have the hours to run it. This behavior directly cost the rest of us money because being late is how you lose customers.

That being said, mercer brought this type of thing on themselves when they decided to hire anyone with a pulse.

 

Well I have to agree..I might've not read it right.. If he took the load knowing he didn't have the hours then yea disciplinary action is needed

 

Like @roshea implied, all Mercer and the agents have to sell is service.
Like @spyder7723 implied, Mercer is the one that decided to hire anyone with a pulse. Sure puts the agents in a tough spot

It's reasons like this is why you want to develop relationships with agents. They want to know who the good guys are who they can count on with their best customers.

 

Like @spyder7723 implied, Mercer is the one that decided to hire anyone with a pulse.


The only problem I see with the "hire anyone with a pulse" situation is the quality of today's drivers, as any of us who have been around for decades can attest to, is highly lacking in experience, skill, knowledge, and the willingness to do this job correctly. Also how much do we see in here of the "ain't nobody gonna tell me what I can do in my truck" attitude? For too long trucking has been the job where breaking the law was somehow seen as a badge of honor, and those who were able to operate perfectly fine (and profitably) within the law bore the brunt of the punishment via more and more regulation, and were also ostracized by the rest of the 'real truckers'. This caused many a good driver to just get tired of things and quit. Training for new drivers is pitiful, with all automatic fleets letting people move the truck around with no real experience in maneuvering in traffic or tight places. Not that manuals are better, but during the time and attention it took to learn to shift you spent more time learning how a truck handled. Rare to just through an untrained person in a 10 speed and have them hit the highway, they would have trouble just getting out of the parking lot. And of course once one has driven for three or four months they are 'experienced' and get to train the new crop of drivers.

So I take some issue with that statement, in that if Mercer did not hire such drives, then there would be very few drivers there. That is an industry wide problem, not one of Mercer's doing. Those who have been at the company long enough can see the difference in van vs open deck drivers as a whole also, and we have been coerced into growing the van operations by companies what wanted us to haul both van and open deck, major companies we would otherwise have lost.

 

Another high speed chase tonight on i77.

 

Anybody called truck pay and asked?.

 

thats 613 miles of highway, can you be more specific?

 

Was in WV around the 170 I think? Was a old 90s model pick up lol

 

I get that the quality of the average driver is no longer what it used to be. So standards had to be lowered, but they weren't lowered, they were completely dropped.

Case in point: a couple weeks ago i called ahead to the foreman at a job site i was picking up at. It was specifically noted in the load comments to call ahead, and he tells me that out of 9 trucks i was the only one to do it.
Thats simply unacceptable.

The business model used to be to provide topnotch service. Now its provide capacity. Basically we've turned into another tmc, melton, or prime.