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Comment by asimpleusecase | Hacker News Reader

Here is the money quote that makes the most sense to me: “They wanted to pay them good money because it was the absolute core of their, of their business — to get this stuff from the distribution center to the store at precisely the right time with no screw-ups,” Lichtenstein said. “That was crucial.”

I am sure that WalMart demands full compliance with all regulations and is very exacting in pick up and delivery times. Likely drives are doing the same routes all the time. A lot of drivers would find that boring.

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Do drivers care about route variety? I don't think it's like flying where you can get a little mini vacation on your route.

Many drivers like driving a familar route because they know what to expect. They know where the low bridges are, they know which roads are designated truck routes, where there are difficult turns, they know which exits have fuel/good food/shopping/parking or are a safe place to stop to get out and take a walk, etc.

My uncle was a truck driver.

Driving a new route (in his work) was generally not considered "exciting" - but taxing.

Most drivers are running a fixed route. You (or often you company) has contracts to make regular deliveries. Most companies that ship something ship the same thing every day to the same customers.

that said, there are a lot of deliveries that are not the same thing to the same place. while they are a minority overall, there are still a lot. If you work for a big national shipping company (WalMart is not this even though they are national) you can ask for a delivery to anywhere - they always have a single delivery to some random location. Though if you want to go to rural states - many other drivers grew up on a farm and truck driver is one of the few well paying jobs they can get without a degree on so there is a lot of others wanting that. (If you want to go to a big city there are plenty of delivers and less drivers with reason to want them)

In the late 90's, my dad was a screen printer and did a bunch of big runs of garments for Walmart stores. He'd built a good size business, doing regular jobs for Disney, action sports, NFL, etc, building a shop that usually ran two shifts of hundreds of employees. It's not an exaggeration to suggest that if it had a screen printed image on it, we probably printed it.

> very exacting in pick up and delivery times

Well, for us, not exactly. For our last contract with Walmart, there was a lot of language about timing. If the driver arrived and the order wasn't ready for pickup, we'd be penalized for every hour of delay. The penalties were such that you could end up losing crazy money on the job if you weren't confident about your abilities to deliver on time.

Not a big deal for us since we were tight, and could easily handle it.

Then Walmart arrived a day early. The driver had made a choice to stop for us first, which, after pulling up the contract, we realized it allowed for that. Our lawyer had determined it was vague enough that the agreed delivery date would prevail, contractually. Which is probably why we didn't notice that the contract also said the pickup clock started the minute the driver arrived, and that was also the official pick up time. Had we caught that during contract negotiations, we'd have refused the terms. But we missed it.

We weren't a small shop. We already ran two shifts, and quickly needed to pull in a third to be able to finish in time to get any profit out of the job.

We almost did that last contract with zero profit, and refused all business from Walmart after that day.

Thing is, I've heard of similar stories where Walmart would do similar tricks with produce from farms. Whether myth or not, I don't know, but I know with certainty how they treated us. There were probably incentive structures in place for drivers to show up early, and some of them had the balls to do it a lot earlier than others. In this case, they could give the driver an bonus for his better than on-time averages, then "buy" goods worth a retail $5M+ for the cost of the driver's salary and bonus, plus whatever the supplier (us) managed to keep after penalties.

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