Lidl Driver

[newlad]

homeward-bound:
I mentioned earlier how the job can be a bit of a mess about at times and today was one of those times.

We run twin compartment fridges allowing us to carry freight at two different temperatures.

2

So we can carry chilled goods at +1 in compartment 1 on the headboard, and ambient goods, fruit and veg at +14 on the rear, or vice versa.

So normally I would load a primary load for Swindon and a part load for Risca. Only when I find out what temp the Risca freight is, can I decide which way around I will load my fridge.

Today however they wanted to load both chill and ambient, for both Risca and Swindon. Which ties my hands on how I can load.

So I loaded Swindon chill, Risca Chill, then I closed the internal door and loaded Risca ambient and finished off with four pallets of fruit & veg for Swindon, which would have to be unloaded at Risca and put to one side whilst I tipped the Risca ambient and chill.

With everything loaded except the 4 pallets of F&V for Swindon, I wait for one of the pickers to bring them to my lane.

1

Pretty soon we’re ready to roll. By this time its quarter past 4 and I’m already running about half hour behind my own schedule. So I won’t get back to Bridgend much before 10pm to load part 2.

I would have thought that Weston Super Mare would have delivered to Swindon how strange sending you over the bridge when they could do it.

[silver_surfer]

Your gaffer knows you’re writing all this on here I presume homeward-bound?

[rob22888]

Lidl looks like a job where you’d become a master of the blindside reverse. Every Lidl i’ve ever seen has an awkward looking blindside bay, not a job i’d especially like to do on days when the car park is full & busy.

[m1cks]

rob22888:
Lidl looks like a job where you’d become a master of the blindside reverse. Every Lidl i’ve ever seen has an awkward looking blindside bay, not a job i’d especially like to do on days when the car park is full & busy.

Do you think they use the same store format as they do in Europe where the vehicles are left hand drive?

[merc0447]

I read in the paper a few months ago that lidl want to double the amount of stores in the uk , lidl and aldi once the brass neck of supermarkets is now putting the fear of god into the established big 4.

You’ll no believe this but ive never been in either of them in my life delivered to the rdc’s but never been in a shop, is it as good as made out?

[dipper_dave]

I have to admit I once thought shopping in Lidl or Aldi was only one step up from mooching in bins but to my surprise er in doors has been shopping in them for years, foods good prices are reasonable, nice selection of produce to boot.

Only found this out when I made the mistake of going shopping with the missus one weekend (thought I was on a promise if I helped out) and she spent half the time man-handling the fresh produce as apparently women folk have this hidden power of being able to tell when something is of high quality just by giving it a good squeeze- just wish she paid as much attention to me todger as she did the onions, or even my onions as they would like a bit of squeeze now and again (gently though).

Think I blew it though when I picked up a tin of beans and asked if she wanted to squeeze it to double check I had made the right choice…

[truckyboy]

Well, of course they are putting the fear of christ up the big four, thats because they havnt got labour charges to take into account, theyve got mugs to do it for them, which i suppose is fair enough if you like that kind of thing, and i hope the poster was jesting when he said its the way forward, no my friend, its where we started !
So now ive opened my gob, may i say that LIDL and ALDI are a great shopping experience, we are able to buy a far bigger shop than we used to ( due to the above maybe ) but the quality is very good ( like their cars, and we have 2 of those ) the only issue i have is, they do not supply free bags, which is fair for lazy buggers like me, who cannot be bothered, but dont mind paying for them when ive saved a few quid on the shop.

[dipper_dave]

I wondered why the wife took a load of shopping bags in, didn’t realise they weren’t free till at the packing part of checkout (which I wasn’t allowed to get involved in). If I ever got a job at Lidl or Aldi and knew that me unloading the wagon helped reduce the wifes shopping bill as well I’m all for it. Not to mention the exercise.

Sure there will be some who think their job is just getting stuff from A - B but for me It goes a bit beyond that… but heck i’m still wet behind the ears and will no doubt be a grumpy old git in years to come.

[highlander]

I enjoy doing Lidl shop deliveries.While I’m doing that I’m doing nothing else.
As for loading,I always put the milk up front and trap them in with the freezer boxes,then when it comes to tipping,just pull the last box back a bit and it acts as a brake if the milk cages decide to go walkabout
We do 1 load a night out of Livingston.2 shops but 2nd only gets ambient,bread and f+v,which can be anywhere between 5 and 10 pallets for the lot,so I tend to load it with the main part of the load ( 1st shop) on n/s and centre of trailer and the smaller delivery on the offside.Means then that I can tip 1st shop without having to unload the stuff for the second shop and can get all the salvage on and not have to remove it at 2nd shop
We were using the internal doors for a while but now chill goes in a TKT as well and each milk cage is covered with a quilted “blanket” after putting an icepack on top.

It can be annoying when you get something on a standard pallet and they still want you to get 33 pallets on.How does that work?

[rob22888]

Highlander:
As for loading,I always put the milk up front and trap them in with the freezer boxes,then when it comes to tipping,just pull the last box back a bit and it acts as a brake if the milk cages decide to go walkabout

Why don’t they just have Arla/Wiseman/whoever deliver the milk direct to the stores like Aldi do? Save you a lot of fannying around.

[dexterboy]

I was offered a job years ago by a owner driver on nights on the Lidi job in Warrington that was load yourself and tip yourself I had to let myself in and out these premises being issued with numbers for the alarm systems ,I thought about it and said no the drops where in Manchester at 1am/3am booze aboard someone could clock me going there every night and be waiting mob handed do you still have to let yourself in or are they now manned ? Not my kind of job

[homeward-bound]

As mentioned a surprising amount of Lidl stores come complete with a busy car park and a blind side reverse. My first drop, Risca, is one of the blind siders although thankfully at 5pm on a bank holiday monday it was blessed quiet.

The view from inside the loading bay shows the problems associated with loading tall pallets with nothing to support them. They lean to some fearsome angles and often fall over if loaded with nothing alongside.

With the Risca freight tipped all thats left is to shut the internal door and reload the F&V for Swindon, switch the fridge back on and I’m on my way. The time at this stage is 17:45.

[homeward-bound]

A couple of minutes after 7pm I arrive at the Swindon store.

The car park is big and spacious without any untoward reversing issues. I have 16 lifts of freight to drop off as well as yesterdays waste (empty TKT’s, stacks of pallets, food waste etc) to collect. By half 7 I’m sitting with my feet up munching a scotch egg and sipping fizzy mineral water.

I used to take a packed lunch but in store I found I could get a BLT sandwich, a twin pack of scotch eggs (luv um I do) a large pack of Walkers Sensations and a litre of mineral water and have enough change from a fiver to get a couple of cups of coffee from the machine back at the DC.

At 2015 (I took a 45 after tipping and reloading) I head out towards the M4 and back to South Wales to tip the waste and load part 2.

With only about 2 ton of waste in the fridge the 440 german ponies don’t back off the limiter which is set at 90 kph. The fully automatic box and cruise control do all the work meaning all I need to do is aim it. I cover the (eventless) return trip in a shade under 2 hours so its just after 10pm when I arrive in Bridgend.

[homeward-bound]

By 10:30pm my waste is tipped on bay 91 and I head around the building to the traffic office on the outward bound side of the building (bays 1-50). The traffic office is adjacent to bay 25. I already know I’m loading for Cardiff off bay 15 because this is my regular route, so I back on to the bay before heading in to traffic.

At this time of night the paperwork already exists so after completing the end of trip debrief, downloading my temperature probe data and handing paperwork in from part 1, part 2 loading manifest is thrust into my hand and any special instructions are handed out. IE. “Leave off three Thursday specials!” Thursday specials are marked with a white A4 sized poster informing me they are Thursday Specials. Monday specials have a pink poster.

So there may well be 5 Thursday specials in the lane but the instruction is to leave 3 off, so thats what we do.

If everything is going to plan we should be able to accurately and quickly check this loading sheet…

…against these pallets on the ground. Only if everything checks out can we start to devise an order as to how we want to load the trailer.

[homeward-bound]

The loading manifest also tells us our lane numbers, which store we are loading for and what the breakdown of pallets is. The whole Lidl model is built on euro pallet sized goods. Everything we deliver to the stores fits on a euro pallet or in a euro pallet sized space. Even store equipment, machinery etc. So that explains EP. But some of you won’t have heard of D-Pallets, or Dusseldorf Pallets.

Oddly, flowers in water are listed under ‘Bread’.

1 D pallet is almost exactly half a euro pallet depending on the thickness of the material its built from. So 20 D pallets takes up 10 E pallet spaces. Odd numbers leaves you with a single pain in the ■■■■ D pallet, which is always unfeasibly tall, to try and stop falling over.

So with all the necessary information to hand its time to head over to 15 C+D, tally up the pallets and solve the puzzle.

After loading the ambient I pay a quick visit to the chill warehouse (bay 46) to pick up 4 TKT’s and 2 pallets as per the loading manifest and I’m off to Cardiff. Its 23.25pm when I leave Bridgend and midnight by the time I back on to the bay at the store and get the loading bay opened up.

Yes we open up ourselves, unload, load the waste and then lock up and set the alarm. Sounds a bit weird but its really no biggy when you’re doing it. It takes minutes to open up or close down

Rather than show more pictures of pallets I’ll draw this shift to a close.

It was 0155am by the time I had the waste tipped in Bridgend and the truck parked up. So this shift took 11.5 hours although due to the weird nature of the part 1 load I lost probably an hour messing about first at the DC and then later at Risca.

All in all a straightforward nights work. No drama’s, certainly no exertions and no rushing around like a mad fool.

When you compare that to the spilled pallet at the start of this thread that shift took almost 16 hours. Its the same job, delivering the same stuff. And there in a nutshell is the conundrum that is, driving for Lidl.

Many drivers that try it have a mare on the first few shifts, and throw in the towel. I wasn’t being facetious earlier when I said there’s a right way and a wrong way to load these pallets. I’ve learnt it the hard way.

But given the time to learn the system as well as to integrate into the Lidl mindset (efficiency) everything just starts to happen that much quicker.

Before you know it you’ve slashed a quarter off your shift time (and not by speeding or running ambers) and you’re a quarter more efficient because you’ve cut all those little time consuming errors out of your game.

Rather than rush it makes you drive slower because if a pallet goes over you’re the one who has to pick it up.

Its given me a whole new respect for my load.

[stevewalsh]

Excellent diary, and insight into your job.

Thanks very much

Steve

[left_hand_down]

Them silly little half pallets are a friggin nightmare. I used to deliver bananas into them every night of the week, which of course were stacked about 7ft high on them, and the slightest bump or jerk with the electric pallet truck would have the lot over.

[switchlogic]

Very interesting. Sort of job I’d enjoy. Used to have to tip and reload yourself at HSF and make sure it was in right order and what not and I rather enjoyed it

[m1cks]

I’ve always referred to those little pallets as printers pallets. The type printers stack slippy vinyl coated paper on which slides off within minutes of stacking.

You say you’ve reduced your shift time due to efficiency. I might have missed it but are you paid hourly or a day rate/drop bonus? It’s against my ethic to drag a job out just because it’s hourly paid but is there an incentive to get it done in a timely manner?

[milk_man]

Good read. They advertise alot in the local paper for drivers out of w-s-m. I enjoy self tipping when I deliver there. If I wanted to leave my current job I would certainly apply.