You’ve neatly arranged your groceries in the back of your car but, on the drive home, you brake suddenly to avoid a pedestrian who has walked into your path. That’s when you hear it — your grocery bags sliding, jars and cans bumping together. You have just experienced a load shift!
Now consider a 40-ton truck carrying an order of, let’s say, pizza boxes for our example, over 700 miles of road. A tight turn or a sudden brake may send those neatly stacked and banded bundles of pizza boxes sailing around inside of the truck (hello, again, load shift).
When the truck is opened at the final destination, our pizza shop may not have the resources to reorganize those boxes in a way that’s convenient for them to store and use. But the driver has done his or her job beautifully; the shipment has arrived on time and everything can be accounted for.
What now?
Our pizza shop could get their staff to rearrange everything, but then they’re not serving customers, and you didn’t plan on adding hours to everyone’s shifts to cover fixing this problem. Plus, what does your staff know about managing load shift and load recovery projects efficiently?
Another company may offer to drive the load back to the point of origin to manage the load shift and try again requiring 1,400 more miles of driving, equaling 22+ driver hours, and 3+ days so as to abide by Federal Hours of Service Regulations.
Safeway Logistics has a much better option.
Safeway Logistics maintains over 600 warehouses across the United States. Our roots are in residential moving. As a result, we have warehouses and load management teams all over the country. If people are nearby, we have warehouses — with trucks and fresh drivers already on-site — there to serve them.
So where another vendor might only be able to offer you luck fixing a shifted load on your own, Safeway Logistics can offer you a quick-turnaround performed by an experienced team who will:
- Take pictures documenting the shifted load.
- Assess the situation and design an action plan.
- Organize, clean, reband, restack, repalletize and reload your goods.
- Provide a new delivery schedule.
We vet our drivers carefully and we are confident that every driver in our talent network follows best practices and does everything in their power to prevent load shifting, but safety is also our number one concern. By driving safely, and in the normal course of over the road travel, shifting sometimes occurs.
Just one of the many ways Safeway Logistics stands apart from others in our space is that we have a service at the ready that ensures these occurrences don’t derail your schedule, and won’t blast your budget. We’ve saved customers, on average, more than $1,000 with these services just by being there locally with a plan in place and a team that knows exactly what to do.
Want to know more about our Load Shift and Load Recovery Services?
To learn more about this service, and about how we can handle all of your logistics projects, call us at 800-545-2899 7 AM to 6 PM ET, Monday through Friday, or email blog@safewaylogisticsus.com.
Drive safely!
