My lad has been over to Holland picking up a load of eggs. He put this on Facebook and it just shows how different it can be compared to UK:
Loaded and gone, so different compared to the UK. I was early and they apologised I had to wait 10 minutes as their wagon had pulled in at same time as me with a full load. Backed on bay before I even got into the building half my empty trolleys were off. 6 people helping load the trailer and then they apologised again as there normally another 2 helping ( I couldnât keep up anyway). All paperwork and a cuppa sat on table waiting for me.
World of difference. Here youâd get someone grunting at you in disgust that you had the gall to turn up and disrupt their day. No wonder so many EU drivers left in 2020 and didnât come back.
The UK is pretty poor on how it thinks of and treats truck drivers. The facilities are sub standard.
Most European countries treat truck drivers as professionals and tend to give them more respect. The parking, eating, and other facilities are generally better.
Obviously there are exceptions, and your ladâs experience seems to be of a good place, but not a unique one by any means.
There is a thread about that in the American forum that rescued me while this one was somewhere else, but in their case it was not unusual to sit for 8 hours waiting to load.
Iâll copy @conorâs post and paste it there if I can.
I wouldnât be surprised if it was 10% true and 90% exaggeration and nonsense.
.
Someone arrives with a shot load and they agree to tip it, rather than refuse it, if the supplier of the crappy load pays for the wrap?
Or, the driver who didn`t secure the load correctly, gets his company to foot the bill for the effort involved?
We do all get stuck with horrible loads sometimes, and maybe we don`t refuse them when we should. Other times we as drivers and human beings do get things wrong, so maybe that was one of those cases?
I will bet there was summat going on behind the scenes that was left out of that faceache post.
Itâs good to read a happy story and indeed there are some horrible places over here to deliver to.
I have waited for hours at RDCs, as I am sure that we all have.
However, in the world of fresh produce, I have also had the entire 26 pallets off the trailer before I had finished my first coffee, once, before I had even bought it and sometimes at the very same RDC that would usually keep me waiting.
I have waited for hours at Spanish packhouses.
In Holland, at least the last time I went there, common practice was for you to go inside, be shown a row of pallets and a truck and be left to load yourself.
No problem at all for me, but some English driver colleagues were appalled at the thought of having to load their own trailer.
Sweeping generalisations are fine, as long as you realise that they donât work.
That was my experience at Lidlâs rdc at Cadeaujac, near Bordeaux. A massive warehouse that was made even more massive by the addtion of a very large frozen store.
We were required to find an electric truck and load ourselves, although very often we had to go searching for a key to the truck. Chicken and egg, keys got lost, so many trucks did not have one, so drivers, once they found one, kept it in their pockets for the next time.
But it was worse than that. They brought the frozen section into use before it was finished. In order to get in to start loading we had to walk outside round the far end to where there was a pedestrian door. Only problem was, because of the slope of the land, it was even higher than the dock entrances, and they hadnât got around to building steps for it. Instead there was an empty pallet leaning against the wall. I began to climb and the pallet whipped back hitting my shin hard, breaking the skin and causing a fair amount of blood.
I hobbled back to the office to demand the accident book to enter the occurrence. There wasnât one, not only that but the man had not heard of such a thing. In the end I asked for a sheet of company notepaper, wrote and signed my story, got his moniker and a copy and left it at that.
I know why Lidlâs can sell so cheap, poor safety conditions and not enough employed staff and, as a result I refused ever to shop at their rotten stores ever again.
Again, based on past experience, in the UK, Lidl, Aldi and Netto all work(ed) the same way.
No one can defend the pallet incident but otherwise, at such places, we have two choices really,
kick up a fuss and get nowhere, or go with the flow, however much we might disagree with the
principle.
Just as the 1970s dockers who were the most militant were usually the young ones who had never had to handball goods in a filthy and unsafe shipâs hold, I started in a job where everything was handballed on and off the lorry, so operating an electric truck really was not so difficult.
Iâm fairly confident that what youâve seen is a spoof of some kind, Fakebook of full of self-styled âcomediansâ, like one I saw recently where a âdriverâ was saying he refuses to get involved in strapping his load because he is a âdriverâ not a âloaderâ . Lol, NotâŚ
A true legend in his own mind
Shame on you Franglais, I thought you were better than that.
I have a long-time friend called Karen; for decades there was nothing wrong with her name. But then the UK became âamericanizedâ so people now think itâs acceptable to make derogatory comments simply because her parents chose a particular first name for their daughter.
Sheâd like a word with you, something to do with a rusty Stanley knife and some testicular clamps?
I had no problem loading at Lidlâs as long as the equipment provided was safe and available, but, as doing that prevented me from taking a legal break, I was then late at my first Lidl shop the next day and penalised by the manager for being so.
There was more to it than that, the manager was not French but Canadian, and not one of those nice English Canadians we know and love, but a French speaking Quebecois who hated all things English, including me.
He thought he was penalising me. He said in angry tones youâre late and you will wait now till I want to allow you to unload. I said brightly, in my very best French which mocked his accent (I had seen how the French in my home village mocked our own pet Quebecois for his accent, but never mocked the English for theirs) that I was very pleased to hear it as I was tired having to start so early and I would now go, leaving my lorry on the dock of course, to my cab, the curtains of which I will close and go to my bed for some much needed sleep. Good night.
5 minutes later there was a tap on the cab door, he was ready with a pallet truck.
i agree faceache isnât the most reliable source for information however, doesnât seem such a huge leap from self tip and self load to you have to pay. I know a friend of mine used to deliver to covent garden market and had to pay to get into the place
Oh yes, the one and only time I went there I saw the booths and had a bit of a moment because I had very little sterling with me. It was the afternoon and I was due to tip in the early morning and wanted to go in to park up so I walked over and asked the man if he would take euros. He shook his head but I had to go in and got back in the motor and pulled across to his barrier, walked across the floor in the Magnum and asked him how much. He said âforeigners donât have to pay, on you goâ .
But I did have to pay at Rungis in Paris.
That left me enough to have the best bacon sandwich in the morning before tipping, we donât get any like that in France.
I have never been treated so well as a driver in England, as I have been as a âforeignerâ.
I think it was at Sainsburyâs at Waltham Forest that they told me to go round against the one way system so I could back onto the dock easier as a left h ooker.
On similar topic ages ago deliver something for a stall/stand set up at the NEC and had pay a deposit to be let it. Said donât have money itâs ok we take card and got a refund when left.
God knows what that was all about
Paying for entry into wholesale produce markets is common practice.
There is a whole other world that starts when most people go to bed.
Itâs called working nights and it suited me down to the ground.
My working nights were for several years taken up by delivering to
wholesale markets, food processors, caterers and RDCs.
RDCs at night are much nicer places to visit and there was rarely
any delay in getting tipped, totally unlike the daytime experience.
The major problem was stopping them taking off too many bloody pallets!
(Markets I mean)
To explainâŚ
When you had a few different drops in one market forklifts would arrive and whizz off in different directions with pallets to the different traders, then when you wanted your tickets signedâŚ
"I only had 3 pallets, not 4 " etc.
I only went to Netto at night, electric trucks, but the delivery was never large and I used the onboard manual pallet truck.
Lidl and Aldi deliveries started at 0600, I think.
The other RDCs were Tesco, Asda and Sainsburyâs, where you donât normally get inside.
