Two Weeks til Kickoff 2014

OK folks.......it's just about that time again.  We will be descending upon downtown Louisville for our annual Kickoff Meeting in 2 weeks.  I will begin to communicate daily to you via the blog, so make sure and check for daily updates.

We have some exciting additions to this years kickoff and a great guest speaker for Friday night.  Don't forget---I need your vote for our prestigious Driver of the Year Award.  It is always the highlight of every Friday banquet to honor the best of the best.

We will staying at the downtown Marriott in the best city the bluegrass state has to offer.

Mark Byrd, our 2012 Central Region Driver of the Year.

 

Knowing your Dollar Stores

Showing that many Americans are still pinching pennies, the largest dollar store chains are planning to open more new stores nationwide in 2014 than they have since the economic recession started.
Dollar General Corp., which operates 11,061 stores in 40 states, wants to open 700 more of its yellow stores in the coming year. Plans are to also remodel or relocate another 525, said company spokesman Dan MacDonald.
It’s not known if any new locations are planned locally.
This past year, Goodlettsville Tenn.-based Dollar General opened 650 new U.S. stores, including 58 openings in Ohio such as Millville Avenue in Hamilton. There are now 771 Dollar Generals statewide.
Dollar General’s growth has accelerated since the start of the so-called “Great Recession” in Dec. 2007. The first full year of the downturn in 2008, the retailer opened 450 new stores, MacDonald said.
“Our business model is solid in good times and bad and is probably more relevant to customers when times are bad,” he said.
Competitor Family Dollar Stores Inc. runs 8,000 storefronts in 46 states, said spokesman Josh Braverman. Plans are to open 525 more stores and close 80 locations nationally in fiscal year 2014. The company’s fiscal year started in September.
That compares to 500 store openings for fiscal 2013, including the newly opened store at 130 Main St. in Hamilton. In fiscal 2012, Family Dollar opened 475 stores such as the one at 199 S. Riverside Drive in New Miami.
By comparison, 180 new Family Dollars opened between September 2008 and August 2009 in the U.S., according to Braverman.
Meanwhile, Matthews, N.C.-based Family Dollar is also undergoing a major renovation of stores — 800 were remodeled last fiscal year, and another 800 remodels are planned this year, Braverman said.
Coolers and frozen food sections are being added to renovated locations, he said.
“Over the last few years we’ve really put a lot of emphasis on improving our assortment in our food category,” he said.
Dollar General this year introduced tobacco products, a move Family Dollar made the year before.
Similarly, Dollar General is also offering more frozen and refrigerated food items including frozen vegetables, frozen meals, eggs and milk in stores as it adds cooler doors, MacDonald said.
In 2003, Dollar General introduced a new format that sells produce and meat. Dollar General Market, as the concept is called, opened a Mason location in 2007.
Dollar stores negotiate prices of stocked items with vendors. These discount stores also tend to spend less on advertising to keep prices low.
Prices at Dollar General for the same item tend to be 30 to 40 percent cheaper than a typical drugstore, and 15 to 20 percent cheaper than a standard grocery store, MacDonald said.
Most of Dollar General’s items are priced below $10, with about 25 percent of goods selling for $1 or less. Family Dollar’s average transaction is about $10, with about 30 percent of merchandise priced at $1 or less, according to the companies.
Family Dollar says its average customer is a female head-of-household in her mid-40s earning $40,000 a year.
Angel Gibbs, shopping with her daughter Jaylen Parker on Tuesday at the Main Street Hamilton Family Dollar, said they shop there “all the time.”
“Not only is it convenient, there’s good prices. It’s about good deals,” Gibbs said. She gets text alerts for two daily deals from the store.
The Main Street store is in walking distance for JoAnn Brumley of Hamilton.
“We come at least twice a week, just to grab our little necessities that we forget at the big stores,” said Bramley on Tuesday, shopping with her granddaughter Diana Marez.
Seventy percent of Dollar General stores are in communities with populations of less than 20,000, according to the company. Family Dollar in the past has looked to open in strip shopping centers, in urban and suburban areas. Now Family Dollar prefers to build new stores to suit, company officials said.
By the end of 2011, dollar stores in the U.S. had outnumbered drugstores, according to research by Ann Natunewicz, vice president of retail services for commercial real estate firm Colliers International, in San Francisco. Colliers has Cincinnati and Dayton offices.
“In 2007 to 2008 when we saw families getting pinched on their personal incomes, there’s always a migration to value, to anything that’s discounted,” Natunewicz said.
“Especially in small communities, people just found them to be a convenient place to shop,” she said.
Consumers continue to be tight spenders, thanks to pressures on their pocketbooks from higher payroll taxes, concerns about rising health care costs, high unemployment and underemployment, reductions in food stamp benefits and expiring long-term unemployment benefits.
As a result, shoppers are spending more on necessary items and less on things they don’t have to have. Discount retailers are expanding food merchandise in direct response to that trend, and the introduction of tobacco drives repeat business, Natunewicz said.
“Whenever you have a recession, people cut back on discretionary spending and they spend more on consumables or necessary items,” she said. “Even the dollar stores have seen some erosion in the confidence of their shoppers.”

Interesting Perspective from Werner COO

This article was published in the latest version of "The Trucker".....its worth a read:

Derek Leathers is an imposing figure physically.

Standing at well over 6 feet tall, the president and COO of Werner Enterprises still looks as though he could strap on the pads and handle himself well on the football field, which is exactly what he did some 20-plus years ago at Princeton University where he earned a degree in economics and immediately launched his career in the trucking industry.

And in those 20-plus years since, he shunned a possible banking career because he wanted a job with more people contact than finance afforded, and he’s become an authoritative and respected voice in trucking.

He’s in demand all over the country as a lecturer and turns up on just about every panel discussion about driver issues.

So it was no surprise that he was one of four panelists on a discussion titled, “All About the Driver” at the recent American Trucking Associations Management Conference and Exhibition held here.

Here are some of the statements Leathers, 44, made as a response to questions posed to him and the other panelists during the 90-minute discussion.

• About 40 percent of the drivers Werner hires are right out of school and the company works hard during the first 90 days of employment to not only help further develop the skills of driving a truck, but to develop an understanding of the industry.

He calls it a finishing process, which at Werner could take anywhere from five to eight weeks and is a vital step because of the changing demographics and changing personalities of young hires.

“We give them a sort of a healthy introductory dose to trucking and I don’t mean the mechanical side or the driving side,” he said. “I mean an industry orientation into the lifestyle they are now entering because as we look at the turnover graphs it would be my contention it’s not so much large truckload carriers at 99 percent and midsize at 80, it’s really those that hire students at 99 percent and those that don’t at a lower number because within the large truckload fleets what you really see is the student turnover rate that’s well into the 100 percent and maybe as much as 200 percent within those first 90 days.”

There’s no silver bullet to making sure young drivers make it past the 90-day mark, he said.

“I think it’s commitment across our organization that you have to literally hold their hands at a significantly higher level than what you do for an experienced driver,” he said. “When I say experienced I mean six months of experience, not someone who’s been around five or 10 years, just somebody who’s been through the initial issues with the loading process at the customer level, or the global communication devices. Those things are very alarming to a new driver in the industry. They have enough to worry about with safety and just driving the truck appropriately that any little wrinkle added causes a great deal of duress.”

• Weekly miles, equipment, pay, benefits and home time are factors that play key roles in driver retention.

“We continuously examine and look at these and I think it’s a combined effort across the board,” he said. “In particular, I think we’ve put a stronger focus on getting drivers home more often, building jobs that allow them to get to the house at least once a week. The days when a driver would be out on the road for two or three weeks and then come home for three or four days, seem to be evaporating right before us. Pay is important. We all know we have a pay problem in the industry, but we also know we are not in a position financially to be able to afford wholesale pay increases until we get better support from the customers. Our focus on the pay side has been more on performance-based incentives (Werner has more than 300 pay packages). That’s what a lot of fleets are doing, building pay packages that incentivize drivers to be all that they can be and make sure that the best drivers’ pay goes up more based on their performance than one year on the calendar that happened to pass.”

• Pay by the hour for all of trucking is a long way off, if ever.

“It’s [pay by the hour] been a short consideration to be blunt,” Leathers said. “We look at all kinds of pay. We do have drivers in our fleet today that for dedicated reasons might be paid other than by the mile. Fundamentally it’s my perspective that we can’t disconnect on how we are paid by our customers and have our driver paid by some different format. The culture of the for-hire carrier unlike the private fleet with scheduled routes is that we are only as good as the person in the cab who is able to be a voice on their own behalf and ultimately on our behalf. In other words, if they are being delayed, if they are somehow impacted in a negative way, they are going to let us know because in that same way it’s alerting us that our truck is not moving and producing revenue and if we were to disconnect those two events and pay by the hour, you would lose the single biggest point of light you have in your fleet relative to the inefficacies, which is a driver raising his or her hand. I don’t want to lose that.”

• Signing bonuses are probably not the best idea for a carrier.

“As we see the industry get infatuated with signing bonuses and things of that nature, the difficulty in that approach is that we end up creating our own churn because they jump fleet to fleet to fleet and we all experience this 90-day phenomenon where you are trying to invocate them into your culture and they are in the cab of a truck halfway across America.”

• The federal government needs to stay out of the issue of driver pay.

“You are not going to see us lining up soon asking the government to get in our business,” Leathers said in response to a report that the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration has been reviewing an Australian study that shows a positive link between pay by the hour and safety. “I think it’s a misnomer that we don’t all wake up every day and work as hard as we can to focus on safety and it’s a bit demeaning for them to think somehow they are going to do it better than we do when it is our primary mission every day.”

But with that said, Leathers offered a perspective that’s not popular in all segments of the trucking community.

“If you really want to shine a light on what is going on out there it’s through electronic logging,” he said. “Until we know that everyone is operating on a level playing field, until we can visibly see we are all playing by the same rules, I think the experimentation we continue to have tinkering with Hours of Service, tinkering with pay methodology or tinkering with anything else, doesn’t make a lot of sense. It’s way too dark out there. Turn the lights on. Get us on electronic logging, get us on a standard format. Let’s prove as an industry that we are serious about compliance and that we are committed to making sure we obey the laws of the land as they are written before they get to write new ones.”

The industry can argue all it wants about electronic logging devices, but the longer total implementation gets delayed the more things may be thrown at the industry with which it disagrees, Leathers believes.

“It’s positive once you get it through the knothole, once our drivers are comfortable with it,” Leathers said of implementation of ELDs, “and I do think it’s a good thing that it illuminates on the dash with wasted minutes because with truck prices going where they are right now, we can’t afford to waste a single minute for a lot of reasons.”

Ho Ho No No

UPS, the world's largest package-delivery company said it couldn't deliver some shipments by Christmas Day as rising online retail orders contributed to deliveries overwhelming its capacity.

U.S. online holiday retail sales were projected to climb 15 percent to a record of more than  $78 billion by Forrester Research Inc. in a published report last month.

What Are Customers?

 



 

Customers are very important people here at J.B. Hunt.

In person, on the phone, and in correspondence. 

 

Customers are not dependent on us.

We are dependent on them.

 

 

Customers are not an interruption of our work;

They are the purpose of it.

We are not doing them a favor by serving them:

They are doing us a favor by giving us the opportunity.

 

Customers are not outsiders to our business;

They are the most vital part of it.

 

 

Customers are not cold statistics-

Names on the computer screen or ledger sheets.

They are flesh-and-blood human beings

With feelings and emotions like our own.

 

Customers are not always right,

But they are always customers.

 

Customers are always welcomed guests

And should be treated as special guests.

 

 

Customers are people who bring us their wants.

It's our challenge to serve them cheerfully and equitably.

So they will return to enjoy our Customer Value Delivery.

Again and again and again.    

Rates Expected to Rise

New federal rules that cut into trucking productivity did not push rates up for most shippers in the third quarter, according to a survey by Wolfe Research.

 

The third quarter survey found 68 percent of shippers saw no change in truckload spot rates after revised hours of service rules took effect July 1.

 

Of the rest, 29 percent of the shippers surveyed said spot rates rose 5 percent on average in the wake of the new rules, which limit truck driver work time.

 

The quarterly "State of the Freight" survey by Wolfe Research provides data that supports anecdotal reports from shippers and carriers dealing with the rules.

 

"There has seemingly been only a modest impact thus far," said the research firm, which surveyed shippers with $20 billion in combined transportation spend.

 

That doesn't mean a more severe impact isn't coming. Truckload carriers are expected to press for higher rates in contract negotiations next spring.

 

That's what Kate Scott, director of logistics at Wendy's Quality Supply Chain Cooperative, told a recent transportation conference she expects.

 

“We were projecting about an 8 percent impact to the rates, not counting in transportation time delays,” Scott said. “We’ve seen maybe a 2 percent impact."

 

However, the third-largest fast food chain expects a bigger impact when it negotiates truckload transportation contracts next year, Scott said.

 

The revised HOS rules require drivers take a daily break and limit the use of a 34-hour restart that lets them begin a new work week in less than two days.

 

Most trucking companies and many truck drivers oppose the new rules, which reduce the distance truckers may drive, which cuts into drivers' weekly pay.

 

Truckload carriers claim the new rules reduce productivity by 2 to 4 percent, limiting the number of "turns" a driver and truck can complete in a work week.

 

Truckers are responding by rethinking or adjusting their freight mix and line-haul operations to get the best utilization they can from existing tractor-trailers.

 

The majority of shippers — 78 percent — told Wolfe Research service had not declined, but 22 percent saw tighter capacity attributed to the HOS rules.

 

The New York-based research firm estimated a 2 percent overall loss of truckload capacity as a result of the rules, based on its survey results.

 

One shipper told Wolfe Research carriers seem to be planning loads further in advance, making his “last minute loads” more expensive and difficult to cover.

 

Other shippers said some freight lanes have been affected more than others and weekend load orders suffered the most when it came to service.

The Clock is Ticking

On the surface, the new hours of service rules that took effect July 1 don’t seem that different, but appearances can be misleading.

The daily driving limit is still 11 hours, the daily on-duty limit 14 hours and the weekly limit 60 or 70 hours, depending on how many days are included in the work week.

But seemingly small changes — a mandatory 30-minute break, new weekly restart requirements — can add up to lots of lost time, especially when congestion, loading or unloading delays, highway construction and other unpredictable events are thrown into the mix. And time, along with miles, is money.

Mark Montague, industry rate analyst at spot market load-matching service DAT, put a lot of thought into how the new rules could complicate drivers’ schedules and lives. A former dispatcher, Montague knows how a broken-down car, a construction-related detour, or just a busy roadway can complicate the best-planned routes. The longer the trip, the more opportunity for trouble.

In a recent post on DAT's Freight Talk blog, Montague came up with a scenario to show how the new rules could turn a two-day trip from Chicago to Houston into a three-day trip.

I won't go over his entire scenario here, but I'll tell you it doesn't take much to add hours to the driver's clock. Heavy commuter traffic, single lane traffic through a construction zone and delays caused by accidents, and Houston, we have a problem.

There’s been debate over whether the new HOS rules will make highways safer. However, there’s no question the rules will make a tough job harder.

It's going to take more than a truckload of planning, cooperation and skill for drivers, carriers and shippers to compensate for lost flexibility and productivity.