As I understand it, I am to write about what I feel each week and even though it was snowing this morning I feel like shipping plants. A day in the nursery business without shipping seems to be a day wasted. Most of our customers are in Chicago—2-3 hours away, or in the greater Detroit area—3-4 hours away, or in Indianapolis—3 hours away, and sometimes Des Moines—7 hours away; we ship in our trucks. Amazing as it may seem after looking at the freight cost schedule in the back of the price lists, we do not get rich on the trucking. We have a computer that keeps track of shipping income and then it keeps track of our trucking expenses—leasing, fuel, tolls, driver’s wages, driver’s motel rooms, and whatnot—and it comes out about even.
Dianne and I have had several heart-felt talks with our shipping manager pointing out to him that his job is to facilitate the fine job that our sales personages do. Back in olden times before we had a lot of governmental people trying to make the world a perfect place, we referred to the people who answered the phone and talked to the customers who were placing orders as sales girls. That does not fly anymore and so the longer term will be used in the future. You will know what we really mean, however. In order to keep our customers happy and to move plants, we tell the shipping guy that sometimes he can lose some money on a specific shipment. The reason is that because of keeping good customer relations we will, in the longer run, make larger sales and be able to ship fuller trucks. We realize that if the plants do not get to the right place at the right time the whole business collapses.
As everyone might know by now, the new electronic log book rules combined with the more recently instituted restricted hours of service rules are greatly increasing shipping costs. You will also note, by comparing the last few years of shipping fees in our price lists, that we were not smart enough to factor all of this into the shipping fees for 2018. We hope that, in spite of this obvious show of incipient senility, we will be able to hold it together well enough to run a good nursery business, making plants and getting them loaded. Try to think about the benefits of this over-sight instead of dwelling on the longer-range implications thereof. We are putting together a good team that will run the business just fine. In fact, we are already getting hints that they think they can do it better without my advice, or even presence. Maybe I am just using psychology on them by forgetting little things.
There are several possible solutions to this potential trucking problem. One of the solutions is for the customers to pick up plants in their own trucks. Things do not run real smoothly around the loading dock when a large crew is taken off their quotidian tasks to load up a customer’s truck, but that is life. One problem with the customers doing their own trucking has to do with quality. They often do not have enough shelves or racks and the driver is going to get the truck loaded regardless, so the pachysandra, that we have been lovingly caring for during the previous twelve months, nurturing and trimming and fertilizing, gets stacked about six high in the truck. This causes a lot of cringing on our part. The plants must be tougher than we thought and we are not going to do that experiment to see exactly how tough they are.
One solution is to load the truck full of empty bulb crates. These come in from Holland and are all over the place for from $1 to $1.50 depending and they come in two heights, tall and short. One of our 10-20 trays will drop right in with some extra wasted space about, but these bulb crates stack nicely and take good care of the plants. They do not work worth a hoot for shipping gallon perennials, only flats of groundcovers.
I have been busily promoting another, and perfect, solution to this shipping problem. I have been looking at what we call CDL Cheater Trucks. We are going to have to find a different name for them because Dianne, who is not so conversant with trucking rules, tends to call them loudly and around the office ‘cheater’ trucks. That does not sound quite right and it does not fit the image that we are trying to project to our employees. What happens is that a truck under 27,000 GVW gets a 150 nautical mile exemption from the ELB, or whatever the new electronic log book is called, rules, and from the restricted driver hour time per day. We are looking at a 19,000# GVW Isuzu with a 16’ box and a 26,000# GVW International with a 20’ box. I want two or three of these sitting around. The debates are going on at the highest levels here at the nursery with everyone else trying to figure out what makes their life easier and me trying to figure out how to give better customer service and thus make more money thus making my life easier. We will keep you informed about how the debates are going.
Needless to say not much in these new trucking rules makes sense. For an example, the 150 nautical mile rule is a radius in a straight line, so we run the line right across 80 miles of Lake Michigan and can almost reach Madison, Wisconsin before we run out of room. But, the really great benefit from having several small trucks hauling 5 racks each is that we can send a swarm of them into the Chicago area thus giving several customers “first drop” service. This is a new term that we have had to learn now that we are coming back into the nursery business. What has happened in the last fifteen years that we have been happily retired has been that the landscaping business has substantially changed. Many of the landscape workers have gotten ambitious, purchased a pickup truck and a trailer and gotten Cousin Jesus to come up and help them and so they are now in the landscaping business. However, they do not have the traditional holding yard. They purchase early every morning from the nearest re-wholesale yard, of which there are now many, and who are our very good customers. If the re-wholesale yards are doing a good business, they sell out daily and need re-stocking early in the morning.
And so, if we have lots of little trucks, and lots of old guys who can no longer get a CDL license but still know how to steer a truck now that we have little ones with automatic transmissions, then we can give lots of “first drop” service. Hopefully this will work out as happily as I am happily hoping.
The big commercial landscapers get delivery directly to the job site. And this works out pretty good until we have to hire some outside trucking firm with a driver unfamiliar with either the nursery business or with our specific business who has either wife problems or girlfriend problems and then the delivery is not made on time and a lot of people stand around a lot while we make frantic phone calls and hear a lot of vague excuses. This only happens a few times a year, but the occasions are memorable and the whole office shakes when that happens. If we have more trucks and more of our own drivers we can have some better control over customer service.
And so that is the trucking business. Years ago when we got big enough to ship in semi’s we owned three semi-trucks and then we hired someone to keep them busy all winter in the off-season and I have never seen anything that worked so poorly in my life even though it was my idea. Three trucks were not enough to make any money and it was way too much to keep anyone profitably occupied.
While we are all on the phone, there is another shipping situation—the add-ons. Our customers keep getting new business lined up throughout the day and they assume, logically, that we can always throw on a hundred more daylilies as long as the truck is driving by. The problem has to do with us scheduling a full truck before we start loading it, thus making it difficult to add on all day long. Most of the customers do not understand why this does not work smoothly. This is where the little trucks come in so we can run around and drop a rack here and there after the big trucks do the main delivering. We really hate to miss a sale. I hope it happily works out that way.
Now that I think about it, these blogs are supposed to be happy and cheerful affairs full of hope, smoke, and vague promises. And so please ignore the bad experiences as narrated in this blog and look forward to our proposed swarm of trucks delivering fine product to everyone all at the same time in the morning.
