Picking my own freight baby! My journey to & of being on Schneider choice, the Adventure & Numbers!

I disagree. You can plan for a shipper or reciever screwing you up. Keep a diary of sorts of how long it takes to get loaded our unloaded at certain facilities and plan accordingly. If you know you should expect a 6 hour delivery at abc grocery warehouse, you don't commit to a load that had to puck up in that window. Obviously unforeseen things will happen. Heck I've had a crane catch fire while unloading me. Took 2 days to get another crane on site to finish the job. Butt the vast majority of these things can be either eliminated by not taking loads to those customers, or planned for by keeping records of how long it will take to get loaded or unloaded.

 

Part of that requires that you've been there before or heard enough credible accounts about that location. However, if that place is new to you, you have no way of knowing what to expect.

 

So please tell me how that's going to help a true OTR operation when each and every single load has new shippers and receivers?
That might be helpful if you run the same customers all the time.

 

Exaxtly

 

You have a point but I usually go to new places every load. We are an irregular route carrier for the most part but I still don't have much issue. Only been held up once this year that caused me to miss my next drop. They paid detention & layover in that load. When I pulled a refer it was common to be at a customer for hours on end getting unloaded & loaded. If I get held up this morning it will put my next load in a minor bind, I'll have to run 68 mph instead of running it slow. If course this is my last load this year so there's a good chance I'm gonna haul butt to get it there so I get home sooner.

I understand where you're coming from FW and I think these customers need to be held accountable & be more efficient getting us in & out. And they should also be forced to let yes stay there if they run is out of hours.

 

Also.. A lot of times depending on the Carrier's Reputation with a customer also effects load and load times... I've seen it 1st hand by being in some customers with multiple different carriers... And it's not always the driver that's responsible for it as it could be the office people of the company that craps on the customer but as usual the drivers the one that gets hammered on it

 

Dang you FW. I'm blaming you. Lol. I'm still in the dock from an 8am appointment & it's probably going to cost me my load home. Lol. It has to be picked up by 330 & it's 3.5 hrs away. So now I've been held up twice. Lol. Both times at grocery warehouses. Now I remember why I don't come to these places anymore. $2.19 a mile wasn't worth it.

 

Perfect case study. You should know from being in this industry more than a week that every grocery warehouse can potentially be a long delay, in this case you allotted 3.5 hours for unloading. That's just not enough when dealing with groceries.

 

You can't plan for everything. I'm sitting here at a shipper now because I was told FCFS, shipper says nope, 1500. So now I sit for 5 hrs while my clock ticks away. Had to reschedule delivery for 5 hrs later, which of course hurts tomorrow. You can identify the really bad places, but sometimes the places you wouldn't expect reach up and grab you too.

 

I'm just curious , why not call the shipper ahead of time to confirm fcfs.