Oversized additonal handling used to be 60 inches or more in length. They dropped it to 47 inches. Think the additional handling charges is 67.50.
No, I interviewed with them but rejected their offer. I would have gone from working 4.5 days a week to 7 days a week for $10k more money. That interview experience made me feel bad for the people that work for them.
48" on the longest side. Or if the second longest side is over 32". Should only be like $10. $67.50 is the large package surcharge for if total dimensions are over 132".
Had a driver deliver a load of packaging to a chicken plant in MS yesterday. Driver arrives at 0645 that morning. At 1100 he calls and tells me he is still sitting in the lot. I call the customer it shipped from and let them know. She says she will call down there. She gets nobody on the phone and her emails have gone unanswered. At 3PM, my driver is still there. At this point we get the owner of the shipper involved and he contacts the president of the consignee. President makes contact with the complex manager and was informed that he had fired every receiving supervisor all at the same time yesterday morning. So nobody was there to tell any employees what to do, so they just didn't do anything. My driver got unloaded at 1800 last night. Fun-fucking-tastic Friday right there.
As a broker, if we have contracted accessorials with a customer then we love detention. The worst is when the small customers are assholes about it because they feel like you are trying to pull shit on them by asking for detention reimbursement. All of our carriers sign up for a contracted $35/hr from us after their 2 hours of free time, outside of maybe a few of the bigger fleets that have ~$50/hr stipulations. Most of the contracted accessorials I've seen with contract business customers are $50-$60/hr. As long as we get in and out times on our POD, we love detention. Spoiler There is an old RockTenn plant (Seminole) in Jacksonville, FL that I used to run recycled loads into that had a train spur that ran through the middle of their plant. Whenever the train came in, basically their entire receiving team stopped what they were doing to unload the train... Which took them about 4+ hours. Drivers would call on the verge of tears begging for us to do something because even if they were empty, the train blocked the exit. Basically if you went there you were not going to find a reload that day. One day we got a call from the manager of the plant who was livid because one of our drivers saw the train coming, said fuck my POD and my paperwork, floored it, and jumped the tracks to avoid getting blocked despite having everyone there try to flag him down and stop him.
This happened on our first load for a new customer in 2014. Spoiler http://westchester.news12.com/news/...n-river-for-possible-suicide-victim-1.7415363 NEWBURGH - Emergency crews are searching for a person who may have jumped off the Newburgh-Beacon Bridge. State police confirm a tractor-trailer was found idling in the eastbound lane of the Newburgh-Beacon Bridge around 10:30 p.m yesterday and that surveillance video shows someone climbing over the rail. Police resumed searching this morning after calling off their efforts last night because of the dangerous boating conditions. Responders say much of the river is iced over, complicating the search. Authorities have not released the name of the truck driver and say no one actually witnessed a person jump.
Produce industry just laughs at detention for the most part. The disrespect for drivers is pretty great. This is mostly California, though, where the egos in the produce industry are more inflated than on Wall Street.
Outside of that, just a few other situations I have had... A driver had to leave a shipper and result in a failed pickup for shitting himself. A driver was told that he could not use their restroom, so he pissed on their guard shack, resulting in getting kicked out of the facility and a failed pickup. A driver arrived at a delivery to a high security facility (only the driver may enter, no passengers) with a flatbed load of metal coils. When the guard inspected the load upon arrival, he discovered the man's wife sitting Indian-style inside one of the coils so that she would not have to sit outside of the facility. Two rival Mississippi trucking companies got into a 6 man brawl (2 of them on our loads) in the lot of a shipper resulting in arrests and 2 failed pickups. Nothing surprises me anymore.
Are any of you guys in management/hiring? I need to hire a new broker/agent and I'm not sure of the best way to go about doing so.
Best luck I've had was hiring and training my cousin. She's as solid a dispatcher as you'll find. So, hiring and training someone from the get is not something I'm opposed to; however, it's more for a jumpstart/growth so I would like someone with a book of business? Yeah? I haven't utilized LinkedIn actually. Interesting idea.
Most brokerages have ~3 year non-competes against soliciting customers, so getting someone to bring a book of business with them probably isn't very easy. LinkedIn is huge these days.
At the very least, someone with experience and carrier contacts. I could genuinely double the business I do if I had someone with national carriers.
I termed a driver a couple weeks ago, he was 4 hours late on a pickup because he overslept. He claimed he was at one of our customers picking up an empty, got stuck in the mud and none of the switchers would help pull him out. I told him, dude, we have a GPS that updates your position every 5 minutes, I know exactly where you were. He still categorically denied he was lying, then he had his elderly mother call me. She begged for his job, that was awkward as I didn't want to tell her, ma'am your son's a liar. Toward the end of the call she told me I was a bad person and she was getting her lawyer involved. Learned an important lesson that day, never talk to someone besides that employee about their employment status.
Fort Bragg, I've caught this guy in numerous lies trying to stretch his wait time or detention and I'd explained to him on each occasion about the GPS. It was the final straw.
I have no idea which customer this was, but this was one of my 5 star review comments for Lyft last weekend. More logistics talk next time! That's pretty funny.
Annnnnnd just like clockwork, we are out of buffer storage inside the store, on the same week it happened last year. Last year sales thought it was a great idea to bring in 500 pallets of one color of one article, knowing good ad well we only carry enough product for 2 weeks of sales inside the store.
So got some detailed data from our freight auditor today. We shipped a TV to one of our repair depots, the box got scanned and measured by UPS (and thus charged) at 103" x 3" x 3". Another one was 93" x 33" x 16" and numerous ones were well over 60" long and 20+ inches wide. We just started shipping 50" TVs last week, and those are in boxes 48" long.
I run analytics for a 90mm parcel spender. UPS dimensional scanners are highly inaccurate. Matching the billed to dimensions to box sizes is somewhat commical
They swear up and down they are accurate, but something is obviously going on when we have a tv box measure 103x3x3. Or 93x33x13
I'm not even sure what we spend with UPS. On just the mobility side they have about 85% of our 20k packages a day. Almost all of that next day air. Then they have like 99.9999999% of our retail shipments which has to be like thousands of shipments a day as well.
Anyone in Dallas FW area looking for a parcel analytics job, PM me. For a Fortune top 20 company. Manager level position.
Seconded for this reason: Ives, a forklift safety and training company, is in town this week. Which means my managers are calling out every single thing we do that isn't by the book. So productivity is non existent. Fuck it.
Say that to myself everyday before booting up the computer. Today's reason is some freight that was suppose to cross the boarder in Laredo, TX ended up in San Antonio, TX and nobody can tell me why. Also the carrier that is suppose to pickup in Laredo is giving me the run around about going to San Antonio.
I despise logistics and EVERYONE I come across in every side of the industry including customers, drivers, owner-operators, and everyone in between :)
I hate Holidays. I would gladly give up the Holiday instead of dealing with the shit that comes before it. Suppliers changing hours at the last minute. Carriers either wanting to deliver early or late (Not as planned). Mass Chaos!
Holiday weekend mixed in with Savannah port shutting down telling all the ships to head back to sea and wait it out and college football coming I do not want to be here at all... Lots of fun
Oh man T&P's. Listened to a story today about Hanjin filing for Bankruptcy. Guess lots of Shipping Companies built bigger ships, but their hasn't been an increase in freight.
Much appreciated it has been a real strange intermodal year IMO (only been intermodal going on 3 years so I really don't know shit)... Zim is getting ready to do the same. Been a treat wasting time rounding up all of their containers basically all for not. Zim is following Hanjin and will be doing the same Sounds like. They use our yard as a depot will be interesting to see how that hits our bottom line.