Sysco: how bad is it?

$2,000 per week gross OTR was baby ####. I was doing between $3700-$4,500 gross when I was over the road with Prime Inc. Intermodal now, doing $3,000 gross.

 

Hats off to you. My trainer a couple years ago was 59. He was a beast at Mclane. He could do a 48” trailer by himself. If his helper wasn’t keeping up he’d leave him at the store and tell management to pick him up. He retired around 61.

I went back to Foodservice at 40. You got to treat your body like an athlete. Wasn’t bad at all did it for a year but really missed Linehaul so i went back to LTL. But I proved to myself I could do it and do it well. My first go around with food service US Foods wasn’t a good one. Mclane was way more organized. What’s funny drivers at Foodservice are more happy. Linehaul guys are mostly miserable and they do nothing physical.

If you do food service it’ll make any job seem easy. Also US Foods and most likely Sysco are senority base. They’ll advertise shuttle but you’ll most likely not get it. I could be wrong but you can get bumped from the run if you get it. Now Mclane Foodservice not grocery. shuttle is totally separate. They can’t pull you off to do routes it’s shuttle only. I worked at Mclane food service not grocery. I think grocery is senority base for shuttle.

 

Yes, Not perfect but way better than US Foods. Us foods and Sysco products aren’t very well organized either. They told us they had engineers see if it’s cost effective to organize it and they said no. This was 10 years ago. I click on some YouTube vids and it’s still the same. You’ll be digging.

I went to Mclane cause they didn’t do stairs. Organization of the pallets. They also did less stops cause they were big stops. When its organized product comes off faster. Only issue was freezer space which was a pain in the butt cause you had to get the frozen into the freeze and it didn’t just wheel in which is bS. I also figured I’d be delivering to restaurant chains which was better cause I can park right there. At US Foods sometimes I had to walk a country mile to deliver.

Us foods had to deliver to mom and pops which are a pain cause buildings are generally old and not made for the volume. See when they built a lot of places they were figuring being delivered by straight trucks. Well America got fat and now it needs to be delivered by big truck. Which at Mclane pizza huts were the same way. Too small for the volume nowadays. And these owners are cheap and won’t upgrade their freezers. So I’d have to stack them in on a key drop if they weren’t around.

Us foods operates mostly in the day though which Mclane is more night work.

if I had to go back to Foodservice I’d do Dominos. One store product. Makes life easy. Plus unlike Mclane their dough isn’t frozen. Dough at Mclane was pretty heavy. Dominos is in trays which is pretty simple. Out west Dominos runs solo routes. Not team. So that’s why I’d go that route.

 

Might have had a lot of applications to choose from. A year or two ago they’d be blowing your phone up. Now with freight slowing and less local bump dock jobs hiring food service is probably actually getting a lot of exp drivers. If you go to USF if you don’t like it you’ll be first in line at other FS jobs cause of the experience at USF. I’d honestly be still at USF if I didn’t screw up. Even with the unorganization of the pallets but everything else was pretty cool. It’s hard at first as an extra but once you get a route you do the same thing every week it gets easier. Then when you build senority you can bid on routes you know you like. Cause as an extra you’ll know the routes.

 

This is what no experience and/or just plain lazy looks like. Five procedures, 2wks apart. 13 years later, I’m still suffering from food service delivery.


Where I worked, the #1 driver was so physically worn out, he had to stop running ramp in his mid-50’s. He made it to 62, retired, and died a couple years later. The #3 guy retired at 62 and his son has told me his dad is really struggling with pain. I saw one of my trainees at a gas station, a couple years ago. When he hired on, he was a stud. The guy set the record for the most cases delivered in a week. When I saw him, he was slouched over and looked like an old man. He said he was really struggling with all the pain and that he should’ve listened to me.

Y’all can do whatever you want, chasing that money. There’s a reason it pays what it does. When you’re worn out, injured, or otherwise suffering, there isn’t anyone on the planet who can bring back your health and wellbeing. Nothing is free.

 

@ducnut you nailed it when you said “chasing that money” that’s all it is, why would a job that pays in excess of a 100K yearly have a revolving ad on indeed, and hiring events constantly?