I am not a big fan of Satellite centers, and you are partially correct. There are a few holes in your argument though.
The satellite centers are a joke, and they dont save UPS any money. In theory, they are saving the deadheading time....but in reality they are simply shifting the cost to other areas that IE is oblivious to;
Actually they also save an extra driver to eliminate some, not all but some overtime.
1. They have to pay rent to a business for the space to park and secure the truck(s)
Nope, most one car sats do not have a building and the company pays very little, if anything, to park the Sat drivers car inside the fense of a customer in the area. In some locals the Sat driver lives in the town where the meet point is and keeps his package car there.
2. They have to install a trailer hitch on a car, obtain or reaasign a pup trailer, and pay the pup driver .25 an hour more.
The cost of a hitch and a T500 traile are much less than that of the previously mentioned package car. The feed driver only gets paid the extra for what time he is actually pulling the trailer, in most cases an two hours per day if that long.
3. They are paying preload to load the trailer...then they are paying the driver to rehandle those same packages AGAIN when he loads his truck.
Most Sat drivers can get their car loaded within 30 minutes.
4. The driver who pulls the trailer cannot make service on all of his NDA pkgs since he must get rid of the trailer first. This means that someone else in his loop has to break off and add miles to service these packages.
Most feed drivers for Sat centers do not run committed air anyway, the extended routes don't usually have 10:30 commit times.
5. If the satellite drivers cant get all their stops off before the scheduled pull time for the trailer...they must go back out to finsh afterward.
That's why they don't start until around an hour after all regular drivers.(well, that and the fact that it takes them that long to get the feed to them) The satellite drivers in my center are averaging almost as many miles now as they did when their routes were in the building. I would say that in this case they may need to re-evaluate the trace on those routes.
6. They either need to pay an independent mechanic to service the trucks, or else shuttle them back and forth from the center for maintainence and repairs.
This is correct our center has to pay $300 a trip to have cars wreckered out and back.
7. When the bid satellite driver is on vacation,sick or injured, the cover driver is PAID for the time it takes him to drive from the building to the satellite location. This means that, for 6 to 8 weeks out of the year, UPS is still paying for the deadhead time that the satellite center was supposed to eliminate.
This is also true, however the cover driver usually gets a head start in the fact that he doesn't have to load his truck. That means that for 44-46 weeks they get whatever savings they perceive they are gaining.
The bottom line is that some genius from IE came up with the idea for satellite centers, and mandated that they be implemented whether they work or not. Since IE is never wrong, and its decisions can never be appealed or challenged, we are stuck with them. UPS pretends that they work simply by ignoring the data that conflicts with the reality that they want to see.
The replies that I posted here are from me voicing the same problems you just did.