The Food Service Rant thread

I was very surprised to see that too. Here in town there is one woman who works at a local dairy she's pretty cool we deliver to the same nursing home and another woman who I think works for Coremark, but outside of that though far few and none. I thought there was only like one woman that I had read about that works at as a driver at Sysco far far away from here.

 

We have two different kinds of routes where I work. We have some that start as early as 2am and others that start around 3-4am. I usually am in the ladder I get up about 3:15am in the morning and hit the road in the truck by 4:30am or a tad earlier sometimes.

We do have key stops where you don't have to talk to any customers however, where I work you wouldn't be able to have a route that doesn't have any customer interaction unless you wanted to do night time deliveries to our grocery stores (the company I work for is the only major broad line food service company with it's own chain of grocery stores) I think some of those routes may run when you don't have to talk to customers, but that's not 100% though.

This company here does have routes that dispatch 24 hours and they do have night work.

 

Definitely something to look into as I mull over transferring and/or switch over to fuel delivery.
I'm basically wanting to stay in the Southwest though and try to stay out of areas that get too cold or icy.
I've dealt with that sort of weather too many times and if I could jump at the chance to permanently get away from it, then I'm good.

Apart from that, these 4.5-5 day work weeks are something I'd rather stick with as well.
Where I'm working now I've got a strict, 5on/2off work week.
While all the other companies around here typically pull a "standard", 6on/2off schedule.

Five days is enough for me, six days would be torture for sure.

 

I see em driving like courier vans and stuff, seen a couple chick linen guys, but never humpin a foodservice gig. Who's at home doing my laundry and cookin my bacon ya know?

 

Good gosh today I felt like cowboy. I had 14 stops with 906 cases. Took me about 10-12 hours somewhere around there I think I was back in the yard post the 12 hour mark.
Good gosh am I out of gas ha-ha.Actually I wasn't last guy back either 2 other guys were still out!

My trailer was packed just packed like a 5 pound sack full of 10 pounds of potatoes. I was 3 stops in with over 130 cases off and it looked like I had just taken a chair out of the stadium, didn't even put a dent in the load. However at last though victory was mine as the final cases came off the truck. I even wrote in pen on the load diagram sheet taped to the wall "Victory".

Did get pushed off the back of the trailer was able to catch my self, but it wasn't pretty an avalanche of fat fryer oil came at me. The chef and assistant chef at the restaurant as well as the dishwasher came out side and they saw what happened then looked up into the truck and the chef just shook his head. Any how the assistant chef felt bad for me so he made me a delicious omelet sausage ham and bacon and some hash-browns to take on the road with me. All in all I ended up running about an hour behind today. One customer was kind of ticked, but to bad. I just told them they added a fairly good sized stop on to my truck that isn't really my stop loaded me to the back door of the trailer to the point where I couldn't even walk in the trailer and had to dig everything out by hand.

The customer who's kind of initial order I had, they are a chain that for the time being us in the broad-line division do, but I think winds of change are coming and the chain that we do the rules and terms keep changing and they also have a couple other restaurant concepts that we also do, but I think eventually what's going to happen sooner then later is the company is going to pull that chain from us and the chain division is going to take over and do it.

Like today I was delivering my first stop at this chain and what comes around the building but a big 50ft volume chain truck to do the chain restaurant next door.

Plus chain trucks run out of the warehouse typically and can dispatch days and nights. Obviously this isn't the forum to talk those logistics, but I see it coming.

 

When I did beer I ran into a couple that drove bread trucks and potato chip trucks, but never Sysco, GFS, MBM, McLane, Beer, Coke, Pepsi (especially side loader) that's about it.

There's one who's a city driver for Old Dominion in my town she waved to me one day when I was getting ready to pull back into the yard. She's pretty enough and was being friendly OId Dominions terminal is across the street from our yard.

It's funny though Tuesday I was pulling into my second last stop and the road is under construction and I see this chick dump truck driver talking to an equipment operator she had blond hair and in real good shape I had to do a double take then I thought to my self "Where did they get her from?"

Yeah usually when I see women it's bread or potato chips. Bread is more mental then anything else one of our drivers right now used to drive a bread truck for a major bakery based out of Navar, Ohio and he said bread was physically not that hard, but mentally it was a huge challenge because it is on the fly route sales where you're basically making sales orders up on the fly at stops. There is a base order, but it has to be tweaked up or down at the drivers discretion.

 

Were 5 on 2 off as well Mains Food and Paper of Conklin, NY is 4 day work week they run regional food service teams supplying Wendy's and Burger King.

I thought about Domino's or Papa John's but they don't have commissary where I live and actually Papa John's and Domino's isn't really easy they drive big trucks that go places big trucks really shouldn't go. Plus gosh driving a sleeper cab isn't anything I've really ever done and pulling the 48's and 53's I'm very rusty at.

 

I've put in apps with Sysco and Shamrock for some postings they had for the ABQ area.
Still waiting to hear back from them as well as a few of the fuel haulers I applied to.

 

Sysco is notoriously slow with there hiring. GFS was actually pretty quick to get back to me after I filled out the application. They were slow going through the drug screen process and all that jazz, it took like a month, but they kept me in the loop and it wasn't bad I guess.