I’m open to the idea of some ridiculous coffee siphon being the best brew method, but LOL at Sumatran. That part isn’t believable.
sumatran is probably my favorite single origin
This guy was born this year.
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So, $110K for a starting trucker seems like a lot? Is that what the market looks like now? @boredsocial ? @BusinessGenius ?
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In a couple hours I will post way more words on the nuances of this than anyone would want to read
Thanks for tagging me
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I’ll be waiting.
Speaking of trucks, how did people in the industry feel about the John Oliver bit last weekend?
Seemed good to me, but I know next to nothing about the trucking business, so I wouldn’t know if he left some important parts out.
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We should definitely get chads and boredsocial on that.
There was one on solar that microbet liveblogged as he watched on youtube and he definitely had some very interesting insights.
Anyone following the French elections close enough to tell me what to think?
Is Macron’s margin of victory reassuring? Disappointing? Impossible to draw any strong conclusions from because of low turnout/too many candidates/other?
Fortunately we have some suitable posters to evaluate this. Seems like @Surf and @DrChesspain (and maybe some others I’m forgetting) are the type of folks that might be targeted. So, what say you guys? Does this ad speak to you? On a scale of 1-10, how bad are we talking here?
https://twitter.com/susanwrongtag/status/1513005688989130755
So first off, Walmart does not hire rookie drivers. So “first year” is first year with Walmart. It used to be 5 consecutive spotless years experience to get hired to drive for Walmart. Now I believe it’s either 2 or 3, and there may be room for one extremely minor ticket, but still no accidents. They are rolling out an unprecedented (for them) new program of hand picking their most dependable warehouse workers to train them to get their CDL and drive the Walmart way and start driving for Walmart with no other experience. I’m sure it will be one of the longest and most thorough corporate training programs in the country.
Walmart prides itself in having the safest drivers on the road. And they back it up with maintaining their equipment to high standards. Some of the drawbacks to driving for Walmart (that allow for higher driver pay in today’s unregulated, crowded freight carrier market) include slip seating (drivers not assigned tractors), driver-facing cameras, handing over your cell phone records to Walmart and getting fired for one text or more than like 10 minutes of Bluetooth headset phone calls (was zero calls until they started hemorrhaging drivers), and micromanagent to the point of firing drivers for being recorded on camera not doing full walk-around inspections of truck and trailer. Truckers tend to be extremely hard headed against that stuff.
Advantages to driving for Walmart include that you should fucking well inspect your equipment every chance you get anyway, and drivers who don’t (it’s well over 90%) shouldn’t be on the road. And Walmart pays you for everything you do. It’s not like most carriers where you’re only paid by the mile and everything else you should be doing as a professional driver is on you. Walmart drivers only haul Walmart freight. This means no waking up in your truck a thousand miles from home at 0500 to start your day, and being told you have an 1800 pickup 250 miles away that delivers 350 miles from the pickup at 0900 the next morning because that’s what was paying your carrier the most on the spot market, despite the fact that there’s 15 hours between pickup and delivery, and you’re allowed only 14 hours of a non-pausable clock before you have to shut down for a 10-hour break, and you’re going to be awake 30 hours for this trip.
No, at Walmart, you start your day when you’re ready, and when you decide you’re running low on hours or are feeling tired, you shut down at one of their stores or distribution centers and use your truck’s auxiliary power unit for your AC and microwave and whatever. At most carriers, you pick up a trailer with something wrong safety and/or legality wise, your day (and thus your pay) is fucked one way or the other unless you want to give in to your dispatch calling you a pussy, and risk an incident or a fine and points that you the driver are responsible for. At Walmart, you say hey this trailer needs work, and you’re already on Walmart property with a thousand other trailers that need moved that you can switch to.
Walmart, just like almost everyone else, does not pay you by the hour or a salary or anything like that. You’re paid by how productive you are, regardless of what’s setting you back that’s out of your control. Except maybe in California where they’re finally chipping away at federal truck driver exceptions to labor laws. When they tell you $n is how much you can expect to make, that’s their most robotic drivers in the most favorable situations.
Trucking causes all kinds of health problems, physical and mental. Drivers miss days. That’s not paid. Drivers have bad days. That’s paid less. 99% of drivers do not even make in a year what they and their employer are claiming they make in a year. But Walmart is a place where you’re most likely to actually do it. You get two full days off every week, or even do a 5/3 if you want. Almost everywhere else, you’re either on the road for weeks at a time “earning” one day of home time for each week out, or you’re home for 34 hours every week. Included in that 34 hours is commute, which is usually multiple hours. Loading and unloading your truck with laundry, food, whatever. Even washing your truck.
People burn out extremely fast in trucking. There is no driver shortage. There is a shortage of being treated like a human being, earning compensation commensurate with the mental, physical, and psychological sacrifices a driver makes. The total “driver shortage” the trucking lobby reports is far less than the total number of qualified, experienced drivers who are doing something else now.
Put up with earning peanuts and destroying your life for a year or two and you can move on to the kind of job that pays you six figures. But aside from Walmart, the probably means working 6 days a week, 70 hours not including time spent “off duty” in the truck or a hotel. And that means sketchy equipment. Night shift, every night. No tolerance for needing time off or rejecting equipment.
Most drivers who make it over a year still are going to have trouble moving on to those six figure jobs. Take me for instance. I put in enough sacrifice to build a reputation at my company of getting the job done, and done right. But now I’m missing work for chunks of time for mental health reasons. I even missed 5 consecutive weeks towards the end of 2021 after I pulled over at a Georgia rest area and called 911 being certain I was having a heart attack. Rode the ambo, did all the tests in the ER, they said maybe it’s a panic attack. Spent the next 5 weeks with the worst anxiety of my life, taking everything I had to seek treatment, get my meds adjusted, get more regular therapy scheduled.
I am very lucky that my reputation compared to 90% of the other drivers at my company (I can be sure of this from my stint working in dispatch for them in the office) means that they did not give away my assigned truck during those 5 weeks. They changed things around to let me work Tuesday-Saturday so I make my doctor appointments every Monday. They paid for me to update my DOT physical which is required after an event like an ambo ride. I still take occasional unplanned, unpaid mental health days. But they don’t get mad. They tell me to call in when I feel better, and when I do, they still ask me “so where you want to run to today.” This kind of thing is almost unheard of in today’s industry. Even with all that, I am out around 6k even after figuring taxes for those missed weeks, because I was also responsible for paying the share of premiums the company pays when I’m not missing work.
I am “on salary” but like I said, in the trucking industry, that’s not what it means everywhere else. It means that the $65,000 my “salary” is, is $250/day. Unpaid for any missed days. No paid sick days or personal days or holidays. Still, until I can string together like 6 months of not missing any work, I’d probably be a fool to leave this job even for Walmart. I get 2 full days off every week if I want them. Company terminal is very close to my home.
There was more about what it’s like to be a driver but I’m starting to get fuzzy, may post more later. Anyway I’m starting to not give money to anyone, making progress paying off my debts, and considering driving for Walmart or driving a city bus in Richmond or Portland. Decent union, decent top out hourly pay arrived at in a relatively short time, city pension, cannot welch on a promise to get you home every night like trucking companies do. Pros and cons for each. Immediate lifestyle advantage to driving a city bus, but much mucb much faster savings accumulation driving for Walmart, to maybe actually afford a down payment for a home in my lifetime, and/or go back to school without accumulating debt.
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Oh this is a huge advantage to trying to sleep at a noisy truck stop or rest area or, god forbid, a shoulder or on-ramp due to the lack of truck parking in this country, and not stopping early while there’s still parking, due to not getting paid the miles you could have made that day, or even missing your pickup or delivery due to stopping early for parking.
Also driving for Walmart means you’re not going to get held up at a shipper or receiver for so many hours you legally can’t drive anymore but you’re kicked off their property when they’re done with you. Or even being held up for a 24 hours or longer happens, and you’re lucky if they allow drivers a porta potty on site.
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I got it covered if he ever does cold fusion.
I was kind of guessing something like this, but it’s nice to know for sure.
Great post!
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Finally got a chance to watch this. Seems like @BusinessGenius could have been a producer on that. The promo for their fake trucker show made me laugh more than it should have.
Watching that one inspired me to blow through the other Last Week Tonight episodes I have piled up on the DVR. End of today’s was great. I wonder if it will have the desired effect.
Walmart is a top 3 trucking job. These people aren’t new truckers at all.
Yeah, there’s some great stuff in there.
- Deregulating labor to try to fight inflation, uh please don’t do that again establishment Dems! The situation calls for stringent labor laws, with such a giant workforce drivers should be among the most powerful unions in the country.
- Starting to see why truckers is such a rich environment for Stupid Freedom politics, of course they’re frustrated with the establishment. Sadly this really puts the truckers behind the eight ball in terms of public sentiment, now the generally held public perception of truckers is going to include a whole lot of “idiot deplorables that believe anti vaxxer nonsense”.
- The “company lends you money so you can work for them” model has been recognized as a social disaster since at least the time of the Grapes of Wrath.
The elephant in the room here is self driving trucks. In USA #1 they will somehow manage to have cozy Washington technocrats “study” this problem for 10 years and then pass a law that allows long haul trucking companies to employ self driving trucks. Hey, they’re not perfect but they crash less than the exhausted mentally abused meat drones! It’s win win. Democrats Deliver!