A new survey found that an increasing number of truck drivers are so frustrated with working with grocery retailers — especially since the Electronic Logging Device (ELD) Mandate went into effect — that they are simply refusing to pick up or drop off from their locations.
The study, which was recently conducted by Zipline Logistics, looked at how trucking has changed since the ELD Mandate went into effect in December of 2017.
Zipline surveyed workers from approximately 150 trucking companies and found that 77% of carriers say that they have become much more selective about what shippers and carriers they are willing to work with since the ELD Mandate went into effect. When asked “Are there any Shippers or Receivers you refuse to go to?”, 80% of truckers responded “Yes.”
When asked to comment on what type of shippers and receivers that they prefer not to work with, many truckers specifically named grocery locations as the places they hate the most due to detention.
“Most Grocery warehouses due to abuse of wait time and any shipper that continuously abuses wait time,” wrote one survey respondent.
Some of the survey respondents even called out grocery shippers by name: “Walmart. Kroger. Pepsi. Coca Cola. SuperValu. Dollar General. Aldi. They take longer to load/unload. Get drivers into trouble. Screwing up the planning and the rest of the drivers week.”
“Owens Corning takes forever to load, Kraft is insane, Piggly Wiggly takes forever,” remarked another.
“Meijer, Kroger, used to be Walmart but they have improved. Kraft is dependent on the load,” said another survey respondent.
Zipline concluded that if drivers are unwilling to go to grocery locations because of long wait times and the added pressure of the ELD Mandate, it is up to shippers to make changes to accommodate them: “More than 90% of Zipline’s customers deliver into retail and grocery facilities, therefore carriers surveyed are representative of this demographic … A select population of drivers are unwilling to go to locations like Kroger, C & S Wholesale, and UNFI because of debilitating wait times. If this issue is to be solved, shippers AND retailers will need to improve the speed of their operations and better cater to the needs of truckers.”