Rod Miller’s 22-truck Chance 2 Transport fleet hauls garage doors for a direct customer as well as brokered cheese in reefers out West, bringing produce back to the Ohio region. Miller’s sons have taken a lot of rein in the back office, allowing him to get into the company flagship Peterbilt and work on the front lines of detention management.
A recent load to Denver illustrates what the fleet deals with not only in that most notorious of detention-prone facilities, the grocery warehouse, but also on multiple-drop loads.
Miller loaded garage doors for drops around Denver. He had five drops scheduled for a Thursday on the way out, all hand-unloads. But the first took an hour too long, the third put him an additional two hours late, and he “couldn’t get to the last two drops in time.”
They had to be rescheduled for Friday. Luckily, the contract with the shipper includes a detention rate of $75 an hour after a specific time for unload per unit of freight, the latter defined by the shipper. Layover pay – payable in this case given the extra day for unload – of $125 also applied. All told, Miller was looking at an extra $350 to compensate for the delays.
On the return trip hauling potatoes to Kroger in Delaware, Ohio, he hit the real detention wall. “If you need a 10-hour break at the place you’re delivering, that’s a good place to go,” he says. “There were 27 trucks waiting for 10 doors” at the facility.
