How long can it take to unload a trailer?

It's not a matter of pallets or no pallets. With grocers and others, they have to take all those high-stacked consolidated pallets and unconsolidate the product onto individual pallets. There might be 3,000 cases and 100 sku's on 30 pallets on a trailer that have to be broken down onto 70 pallets for count and rack-ready state.

Plus some places are just slow for any one of a number of reasons. Slow loads or unloads will happen sometimes, even with a palletized load. 6 hour unloads are far and away the exception, but 2-3 hour unloads [and loads] are still fairly common.

I'm sitting at a shipper dock now. Had a noon appointment and it's now past 4:00pm and they haven't even started. This is unusual in my circles at this carrier, and to be sure I'm demanding detention after the second hour and I'm also telling them I'm done doing this shipper. Same thing happened last time I was here on a weekend about 4 weeks ago. They can do what they want with that information. I'd rather have sat for 24 hours waiting for Monday and another shipper option, rather than be disrespected like this.

 

I had no appointment and I was to get loaded at a poland springs. I was assigned a door. I went to the door and was at the door at 10 am. I checked at theoffice at 11 am and was told to wait my turn. At 12 pm I was told they had gone to lunch. At 1pm still nothing but I would have to wait my turn. I was thankfull that I was with a company at that time and told them I was still waitng to get loaded. It took Poland Springs maybe 15 mins to put 40,000 pounds of water on that trailer.

 

Everything @STexan said.

It's entirely dependent on where you're delivering, or picking up, even.

I used to do LTL, and most of my stops averaged 3 minutes for delivery and maybe 5 minutes for pickup, but we did have larger 3rd party warehouses we serviced that could take awhile to offload, and sometimes longer to load. We had countless occasions at some of these shippers where we had to deckload the entire trailer with boxes of clothes, toys, electronics, etc. Depending on the item, we would load up to 5,000 pieces per trailer, and that's in a 28 footer. Believe me, that will take some time. And we weren't usually loading one trailer, but a set. I hated the days when my dispatcher would start my day with, "Take an empty set to Regal", because odds were that I would probably be loading two sets, not just one. And that would be an 8+ hour day for me.

 

Many years ago when i was pulling a reefer trailer. I had a load of baby food from Gerber in Arkansas, to Phoenix, AZ, I had on 36 pallets. I broke down to 78 pallets at the end. It took 9 and a half hours for Gerber to break them down. I use to pull boxed beef from I.B.P, and National Beef in the midwest. All load were floor loaded, and could take up to 6 - 8 hours to hand unload on to pallets. Really is dependent upon the receiver, and product breakdown.

 

And then I went to Dr. Pepper / Snappel just north of Oklahoma city a couple of weeks ago with a truckload of product and was MTY in 20 minutes. ....no lie.
Like everyone else said, it just depends.

 

Years ago...like 1998....Anheuser Busch, Williamsburg, VA. We’d haul empty bottles up, beer back. Three or four loads a week. (This was before any type of automated loading).

Shortest time from in the gate, drop bottles, get empty, load beer, exit gate...about 45 mins.

Longest, for me anyway...14 hours.

Averaged probably 3 hours.

 

I picked up a load of motor oil in Ohio this past week, which was loaded on my trailer in just 27 minutes.

On the other hand, last year it took Kellogg’s in Atlanta 13 hours to load me.

Like the others have stated, depends on the customer and how efficient they are.

 

Ya’ll could use a lesson in gettin’ ‘er done!
‘Bout 25 minutes to drop 44k ammonia nitrate the old fashion way. Pull a tarp over it and call it a day

 

Wow. That would be interesting. For instance, I haul frac sand in a pneumatic tanker. You wouldn’t fit very many pallets in there, but I can haul 50,000 pounds loaded in bulk.

By the way, it seriously takes about 5 minutes to load. Sometimes 10 if the loader is slow.

Takes about 25 minutes to unload.