Does your brother run the entire route from manufacturer to retailer? Or should you be multiplying that $1.80 surcharge by five or six?
~Max
Jesus, I have no idea what is happening with that post.
Was going to mention this, then noticed the post was wonky. He goes from manufacturer to warehouse or store, depending on the orders. Walmart has you deliver to distribution centers. Other places go direct.
The $ symbol triggers MathJax/LaTeX formatting. Use \$ to avoid that.
It tries to guess when you are just writing dollar amounts and when you want the math formatting, but apparently isn’t very good at that.
~Max
I’d really have to know if that’s a typical load, or if the reason he was talking about it was because it was a pretty shitty load. If nothing else, there’s no real reason it should take 3 days unless there were extenuating circumstances due to weather or traffic.
I also assume that he’s not paying for gas or maintenance of his truck from that.
Using one load to extrapolate the costs of an entire industry doesn’t really give useful numbers here.
And the companies that ship hundreds of thousands of packages of diapers don’t know your brother, and will take the lowest rate they can.
Not saying that we shouldn’t work to ensure that your brother and those like him have a fair wage for their work, just that appealing to people to pay five more cents per package of diapers isn’t going to get us there.
Hmm. 800 miles in three days, that’s a pretty slow average speed. You’d have to be driving about 45mph for six hours a day, but I assume with such a long route you would take a freeway.
~Max
Yeah, it was intended to be illustrative, I don’t know how much shipping a few pallets of stuff costs. The point being, why aren’t there freight companies rushing to fill the premium slot, where time and reliability matter? Such things obviously don’t matter for all shipments, but matter very much for some shipments.
A 150% of the cost to get a guaranteed delivery time, versus best effort, seems reasonable. Look at the difference in the cost of “shipping” a few pieces of paper: $0.58 best effort; $8.95 maybe two days, but probably three; $27.95 definitely two days.
My real question is, are there still shipping companies out there that own and maintain all of their own trucks, and just pay their drivers an hourly wage based on how long they’re actually working? I mean, I’m sure they exist, but is it any of the big ones? I thought the biggest shippers now are Walmart and Amazon, two companies not known for fair labor practices.
In a dystopian short story way, I’d love to see the “independent contractor” thing applied to airline pilots, who will have to own, fuel, and maintain their own planes.
Is that his final net? If so, that’s an hourly rate of between $11 and $30 an hour, depending on how much of the time he counts as working. (Figured as about a 12-15 hour drive, and up to 42 hours maximum of working before timing out each day).
If he’s an “independent contractor” and fuel and maintenance come out of that $440, then he’s in really bad shape. That used probably $350+ in fuel just to get there.
Either way, that seems to me like low pay for honest, skilled work. $30/hour isn’t bad, but if it’s only 15 hours of work in three days, then the total pay is still low.
Contract pilots are a thing for like, skydivers, flight instructors, tours, and private chartered flights. I don’t know about them owning and maintaining the planes though.
~Max
I do not know how to respond to that last other than noting that making up numbers didn’t help either. I at least extrapolated from real world data points to show the consumer impact on an actual shipment if you paid a single trucker $100k. 
Y’all here assuming that stores and warehouses just take the trucks whenever they arrive.
He usually picks up @ 2am. Drives until told to stop. Arrives next day, day after, whereupon he has to wait to unload (usually @ night if he is delivering to a store).
At best you spend 2 days going 800 miles and that’s only if the warehouse takes you when you arrive. Which isn’t common, listening to him talk about it, lol.
And I extrapolated from real world profit margins to explain why the shippers aren’t going to triple his pay.
Like I said, this isn’t going to be resolved by people agreeing to pay five cents more per pack of diapers. There will always be a lower bid to take a load, unless there are regulations putting a floor on it.
It seems reasonable to pay as a consumer, but it’s not reasonable from what they will charge. As you point out, the guaranteed delivery time is 48 times the best effort rate. Even just “better” effort is 20 times more expensive.
Most goods aren’t that time sensitive. Does it really matter if that truck of diapers shows up on Monday or Thursday? Not really. If it costs you 10% more to get it 4 days earlier, you are unlikely to pay that. If it costs you 48 times more, you certainly won’t.
Of relevance, here’s something I saw.
Walmart workers who once unloaded trucks now have a chance to drive them.
The nation’s largest retailer has launched a training program that gives employees who work in its distribution or fulfillment centers a chance to become certified Walmart truck drivers through a 12-week program taught by the company’s established drivers.
Walmart, based in Bentonville, Ark., also said it is raising pay for its 12,000 truck drivers. The starting range for new drivers will now between $95,000 and $110,000, according to Walmart spokeswoman Anne Hatfield. The retailer said that $87,500 had been the average that new truck drivers could make in their first year.
~Max
One important detail that article misses:
Walmart has about 12,000 workers that drive its company-owned trucks.
So it seems Walmart at least is recognizing the fundamental problems with the trucking industry, and are doing things to try to fix it. It will be interesting to see how this works out.
And considering how relentlessly profit-driven Walmart is, this kind of puts the lie to the claim that trucking can’t make a profit without screwing everybody they possibly can.
Well, Walmart does its own trucking as a vertical business. They don’t have to worry about losing business due to competiting delivery services, since they are their own retailer and have essentially monopoly power over Walmart’s trucking needs. What works for them won’t necessarily work for a company that does only deliveries.
~Max
The only flight instructors I’ve known who instruct in airplanes they own were either ultralight instructors or one tailwheel instructor I know. The rest all used either the student’s airplane or a rental airplane.
Re: reshuffling vs resigning, if I take the last decade of nonfarm payrolls and extend the pre-COVID trend line, we come up short by about 5.8 million in March. If that’s reshuffling, someone dropped a few cards.
And we have about 4 million excess job openings above 2019 levels.
I don’t think any of the previously-discussed reasons have changed much. Nothing mysterious going on.
Not really, as moving and distributing stuff within your own network is a completely different beast than taking loads for third party customers.
Wal-Mart may be willing to pay a premium in order to insure that it has the proper capacity to fulfill its stores’ needs. They can also ensure that all trucks are at their capacity and they have very few partial loads going out.
This is not the same as third party shippers. Not only is there more price sensitivity among businesses who use it, but they are also not necessarily going to have full loads being transported. When I have stuff delivered to my business, I have a single pallet, and there have been times when it was the only pallet on the truck (I assume not for the whole route, but at least some of it was run with just that single load).
According to indeed, your average truck driver makes a bit over $80k a year. Wal-mart isn’t paying all that much more than the average.
The example given by @JohnT, if extrapolated into a yearly salary, works out to being paid less than half of what an average truck driver makes, so I really don’t see it as being useful in a discussion about what the rest of the industry is doing.
And once again, they aren’t the ones doing the screwing, it is the customer who chooses the lowest cost to ship their goods. Not much you can do about that, without creating regulations that create a bottom to that.
And is my friend’s husband getting a raise, or will Walmart go the route of many employers, and screw over their existing employees by paying them less than the new hires?
Keep in mind that truck driving pay per year is incredibly deceptive versus the actual work needed. Truck drivers that make what sounds like decent amounts of money are working usually more than 14 hours a day (technically only allowed to work 14 hours a day based on federal safety regulations, but most drivers usually sneak in some technical ‘work’ stuff outside of that anyway) until they hit 70 hours a week. And they don’t get to go home very often, and their options for what to do when they’re ‘not working’ are extremely limited since they’re at a truck stop or rest area, so even when they’re ‘not working’ they’re basically stuck.
I don’t know if any of these numerical models people are creating are particularly useful for this discussion. I’m not an expert, but what I do know is that global supply chain management and logistics is extremely complex and a lot of smart people use a lot of technology and in depth data analysis to figure out how to optimize that T-shirt or Hello Kitty doll or 4k flat screen television’s journey from wherever it’s made to your home.
It doesn’t really matter anyway, as no one is ever paid “enough” money. Particularly at low-level jobs, but even higher level jobs everyone things they should be earning more or have a better title or whatever.
The problem as I see it is the way employees are treated by companies at pretty much every level that isn’t the CEO. Companies want it both ways - they want undying loyalty, perfect execution, and total cultural conformity. But they also want to treat employees like completely disposable commodities.
Plus working in Corporate America in general tends to have this overarching layer of bullshit and pretention that makes it somewhat distasteful, even under the best of circumstances.
I think people just aren’t willing to put up with as much BS for some vague promise of “equity” or “a corner office” or some other carrot dangled in front of them for the next 10-20+ years.