soberups
Pees in the brown Koolaid
Last I heard, our sat route was a money loser regardless of where it originates. By making it a sat route, UPS saves by passing the costs of 90 minutes pay and roughly 90 miles worth of gas onto the driver.
But the bid driver loves it, because he lives out there and gets to roll out of bed at the crack of 9:15.
That time and gas isnt really "saved"...it only gets shifted around to the other drivers in the loop.
The feed driver who pulls the trailer can no longer make service on all his own air, so it must be given to another driver in his loop who breaks trace to deliver it.
The feed driver must also break trace at the end of the day in order to drive all the way back to the trailer and retrieve it. And if he cannot get his own deliveries off by the pull time, yet another driver in his loop must break trace to sevice those deliveries.
If the satellite drivers cant complete their deliveries by the pull time in the evening...they must then break trace, return to the trailer in order to unload their pickup volume, then go back out on trace to complete their deliveries.
What else? Lets see....we are paying a preloader to load the stops into the pup trailer, and we are then paying the drivers to unload and reload those packages again. And the process of handling each package twice is repeated in the evening.
We pay a mechanic to drive all the way out to the satellite ctr to work on the cars, or we pay to have them towed back to the home center.
We pay the feed driver an extra .25 per hour, and we pay about $600 per package car to install a hitch. And for every sat route you need two hitch cars, in case one breaks down or is pulled for a PMI.
A brand new TP-6 trailer costs about 8 grand. I pull mine about 30 miles per day, and it goes through 2 sets of tires per year, probably $1000 worth.
We also pay rent for the location of the satellite center, and we pay full retail price for fueling the cars at a gas station.
There are probably a few situations where a sat center makes sense, but most of the time they are money losers.