Blizzard brought up a valid point in this message....
some questions to ask should be their dispatch schedule...some shutdown at night and some days of the weekend as in not looking for loads and have just their cells for breakdowns and emergencies.....
The same can be said of Landstar agents, and Landstar is a large carrier (over 8,000 trucks). Landstar Express America, the expedite part of Landstar has just over 250 trucks but the agents generally operate the same way. Their offices are busiest during normal business hours. Some agencies staff their offices 24/7 but only with a small crew after business hours, mostly to monitor the trucks.
While there are exceptions, of course, most of the shippers who have loads to schedule work during normal business hours. They may schedule an expedited load to pick up and deliver outside of normal business hours but the desks from which shippers schedule their loads are not, as a rule, staffed 24/7.
Not knowing any better since we had only worked with one carrier, and not having any reason to think more about it, Diane and I were surprised to figure out, when we changed carriers, that a lot of the loads our former carrier dispatched to us were not emergency loads at all. They were scheduled well in advance and only treated as emergency loads when the computer gave us a limited time window and the carrier required us to report our every move; as if the world would end if you did not bump the dock at 2:37 a.m. of a consignee that did not open until 8:00, or drive a load straight through to deliver on April 3 that the shipper wanted delivered sometime before August.
There is true expedited freight and there are true emergencies. But there is also an intentionally generated sense of emergency that is absolutely artificial. Such an approach to expediting creates unecessary stress and fatigue and creates dozens of opportunities for failure that, while meaningless to a shipper, can have very real consequences for the driver.
The test of a dispatch department is not whether it is in an office that is staffed 24/7. It is whether someone competent and with authority will answer the phone when you call anytime day or night. And with Landstar agents, that us usually the case.
For accidents or safety issues, Landstar has people on duty in their corporate offices 24/7.
Another aspect of this is, how much trust and authority is the carrier willing to vest in the driver? How responsible is the driver considered to be? What kind of communications is the driver allowed to do and what kind of decisions is the driver allowed to make?
At Landstar, our need to call dispatch or an agent at every turn all but disappeared because Landstar gives us the information and authority needed to manage a run.
