Of course, I found this thread after the interview took place, but I'll add my two cents anyway. :lol:
WARNING:
Long post to follow....... :wink:
I drove a side load 16-bay tractor / trailer for Pepsi here in Albuquerque.
I was paid $500 / wk salary plus a "bonus" of 10 cents per case delivered.
Normally, I would have anywhere from 600 - 700 cases on my truck per day, which comes out to $60 - $70 per day for the "bonus". On average, I would gross $750 - $850 per week depending on how busy my routes were and how pushy the sales reps were that week.
I would deliver to schools, restaurants (Arby's & some locally owned places), some businesses, recreational establishments (bowling alleys & golf couses), and of course gas stations, and convenience stores. Sometimes I would deliver to some of the smaller neighborhood grocery stores, but that was maybe two or three times per month.
My day would start around 4:30am when I would come in, print out my inventory and my stop list, have the inventory checked by the yard dog to make sure the trailer had been loaded correctly, and to load my hand cart and portable curb ramp into the truck. That whole process normally took about 30 minutes. By 5am, I was on the road to my first stop where I would unload, by hand, each and every case of product that they had ordered.
Once the entire order was inside the building, someone would have to check the order in, again, one-by-one by hand, to make sure everything was there and accounted for. After the order was verified, I had to fully stock every shelf, cooler, rack, display, etc that Pepsi had at that particular location. This included rotating stock, giving credit for damaged or out of date merchandise, and picking up the empty "shells" (which are the plastic cases the product is stored in" to return at the end of the day.
My average stop was around 50 cases, though I had some single stop orders that were in excess of 200 cases. Once you get good at unloading and stocking, you can get it down to about 5 minutes per case. A 50 case stop would take roughly 30 - 45 minutes while the 200+ case stop took me almost 3 hours.
As for the stops - on a light day I might have 12 - 15 stops while on a busy day, 18+ was pretty common. The Pepsi warehouse in Albuquerque had routes that went as far south as Socorro, which was pretty close to 100 miles away from the warehouse and as far north as Cuba, which clocked in at around 50 miles away.
I was unlucky enough to have the route that went to Socorro. I had that route every Wednesday, so on Wednesdays, instead of coming in at 4:30am, I was there between 3am and 3:30am just because it took almost an hour and a half to even get to my first stop.
My first stop on Wednesdays was a truckstop in a little town on I-25 called Lemitar. Their normal order was about 150 cases of stuff. The manager there was pretty cool, he didn't make me stock the coolers, so I just had to unload the truck, take it inside to be checked in, then move everything to the cooler. Even being able to skip the stocking process, it still took me a good hour and a half to two hours to complete that stop - and I still had 17 more stops after that.
Remember me saying that I would start my day at 4:30am? I didn't get home until almost 5:30pm - 6:00pm every night. 12 hour days were the norm, with 14 not being unheard of. Also, remember how I said I would gross roughly $800 per week?
$800 gross divided by 60 hours per week comes out to around $13 an hour. Too bad I didn't actually take home $800.
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My net (take home) pay was about $550 - $600 after taxes and insurance premiums were taken out. So now we're at $10 an hour, sounds OK, right?
I worked there for 7 months and in that time I had heat exhaustion 3 times, started to develop arthritis in my hands, knees, and elbows, and my back was constantly sore the entire 7 months. A female co-worker was taken to the hospital, via ambulance, after collapsing due to heat stroke last July because of workload. Not very much fun.
Yeah, I was home every night, but when I came in from work I ate dinner, took a shower, and went to bed by 7:30pm just so I could be up and at work again by 4:30am. I gt to spend maybe an hour to an hour and a half with my family at night, and then I spent half of my Saturday sleeping and just generally recouperatng from the week which left very little time for anything else.
Since then, I went to work for a local construction outfit driving their "field service truck" which is pretty much just a glorified fuel tanker. I get paid $18 / hour to drive from job site to job site, put a fuel hose into a piece of equipment, like a front loader or something, fuel it up, and then scurry off to the next job site.
Today was a "busy" day for me...I fueled 9 pieces of equipment and worked a whopping 7 hours. The hardest thing I have to do is pull the fuel hose off the reel. :lol:
Beverage delivery is back breaking, low paying (for the amount of time and effort involved) and tedious - but they'll hire almost anyone with a CDL and a decent driving record. If you're looking at this type of job just so you can be home at night and on the weekends.....I would suggest that you keep looking.
I drove SW regional for Swift prior to working for Pepsi and I left Swift so I could be home more. Technically, I was indeed home more, but I was almost never able to do anything, so it's like I wasn't really there. Pepsi actually made me miss driving for Swift.
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