This has been a bad year at Walmart.

Hey drozzer, Even though we are not realigning, the warehouses are.... all dispatches will be losing and gaining stores requiring shifting of some trucks and stores as well as bid runs. I believe all dispatches have been told to increase driver counts by 5 over the next weeks. If you run the math, I think you will find your office has seen about a 15% increase in drivers over the last months....about what they are expecting to lose when the "big" changes hit. In the 31 years I have only seen one other postponement and that was because a warehouse was not online...so this is big. Meetings are scheduled for the end of this month and I am supposing this is when they were going to do the big change. Then someone realized that if a bunch of experienced drivers walked, might be hard to get those last minute loads delivered in time for santa Guess it will wait for January.
You are right though The expensive private fleet has been walmart's secret weapon. Other retailers attempted to lower costs by contracting out there fleets...and where are they? Question is....what will it look like in the future. With the crew up there now and where they came from...worries me.

 

I actually like the day cab, i get everything i need to do on the tripsheet & no qualcomm:
Yup la puente ca

 

Big corporate has been preaching cost cutting all my life. It really started about the late 70's when jobs and stuff got exported to China to make for a paraprasing 1 dollar a hour instead of expensive Union Americans at 30 dollars a hour. I watched baltimore harbor once filled with over 70 plus employers plus even a shipyard etc. pretty much get converted to residental housing with maybe a dozen employers left.

Walmart has bigger problems than paying truck drivers.

If you are really careful you can interview and fact discover carriers who have accounts that drop/hook in walmart distribution centers. That eliminates most if not all the problems associated with them. Ive live unloaded 4 times in a walmart super center and each of the 4 times required a comcheck approaching 100 dollars for the work. And you wonder how they get low prices.

The associates in the stores are not too happy either. I experimented with their pharmacy for two months until I realized that the one loud staffer with big mouth was telling not just me but 30 more waiting behind me the type and amount of drugs in that little bag. Since there was about 1000 dollars involved in two months worth of medicine sales to walmart and they make me a target, I go back to my usual pharmacy which is very discreet. (And defensible too. Several carriers plus the armed staff) So walmart loses about almost 13000 dollars for annual medicine sales on just myself alone. *(I have several forms of drug insurance, double covered in some cases)

There are one or two staffers I enjoy working with when I pay for the stuff in the store. But I give them about a year before they get onery like the rest.

 

They have day cab runs out of apple valley everyday, the senior drivers that want to get home everyday get those & are assigned a day cab
I fill in , when they are on hometime or vacation;

 

May need to apply some bumper grease....looks tight

 

Yes; & we have a lot more of the challenging receiving areas
One of our drivers got stuck trying to get into the back of this store with a sleeper truck