Complaint Review: JB Hunt - Lowell Arkansas

I had all kinds of fun with them trying to get me to quit when I was making too much money there. I see they now pay a whopping .34 for 3 yrs experience. Swift pays better than that, lol.

JB Hunt is the best and worst company out there. I luckily was able to escape and not get put under a load or have some other DAC type problem in retaliation for quitting (that I know of).

I am also from an upset group of people who waited on Swift to fix their "junk" trucks and trailers and went to JB Hunt because they have a "superior maintenance program."

JB Hunt, if you are lucky will get you in a few months after you need something. Especially if it is something "you don't really need" like the Qualcomm. have fun calling and getting a hold of fleet managers that don't have time to read everything off for you. That eases the stress of not knowing what your paid miles are or what route to take only to get told your out of route miles look bad later on. They are too busy even when you are right down the road or better yet just sitting at a terminal with nothing better to do. Geez, how I missed Swift and them just getting the truck in and looking at it or telling me the part would be in by the time I got home next or something.

I replayed all my late night shop experiences in my head and appreciated the hell out of the mechanics at Swift. They screwed up a few times, but I pretty much dropped the truck with the same list until everything was fixed if they hurried through it. They were never too busy to just check things out and do SOMETHING.

I had a lot of nice loads at JB Hunt, most of the time things were smooth. But I'm telling you the Fleet Managers (whose incentive is to run your truck until either you die or it dies) would rather have you get lost, break down in the middle of nowhere with no cell signal or qualcomm, deal with windows you can't see through because they aren't cracked bad enough yet and gamble that you will live long enough and not kill anyone and make their stock look good to investors. If your drive tires aren't completely bare or you have a flat already, you should probably listen to some of the others that I thought were joking, but they would say you need to make a flat or break something bad if you want it fixed. I never did this, I wonder if you are thinking I should have and it's my fault for not making a disaster so they would fix it. I think that's wrong.

I actually enjoyed not having the Qualcomm, but they tight on taking the shortest back road route. Getting lost is kind of a thing of the past, but it's pretty cheap and lame how they don't just get everything fixed. I mean, they must have figured out the OBC routing and information was cutting costs and getting loads on time (can't tell you how many loads I didn't even know about until it was almost too late to pick them up).

As soon as my Qualcomm got hooked back up and was fixed right...Guess what messages came up?

"We are losing customers, we have to get loads on time" lol. Well, where the hell am I going to get it, what time, etc? (There is also a lot of new drivers saying yes when they dish out impossible times you couldn't make even if you broke all the rules).

Even though I called every 30 minutes (and got people telling me they don't have time and to use my OBC which was DEAD), I still had a few loads that were going to be picked up late. I never had a late pickup or delivery, unless the roads were impassable.

I'm not even sure if I had any kind of service failures from probably 20 loads I did with the old call and get half the info I need from kids that can't even read abbreviated directions and half the time would leave out four or five turns out of the directions procedure, but I usually got the "we understand" when I complained that they were making it impossible for me to do anything on time but you never know.

Anyway, like all companies you are playing the lottery but if you are anal about getting things fixed this is not the company for you. Even if you don't like the Qualcomm, the way they force feed the shortcuts and expect you to know additional info like "you must scale before entering" or other important info (They forget to tell you because there's just no time...Those Fleet Managers just work their asses off I'm sure too because knowing them they run the whole company with 3 people. It sure seems like it).

They also downsized their B Service. You used to be able to go to a Freightliner. No big deal, you can go to a terminal and do it on your home time but. Their terminals are smaller than most people's back yards and rarely had room before. Imagine how much fun it is to route everyone into a muddy lot with room for maybe 20 trucks (running 500 or more drivers out of).

I hope they improve because they were close to being a nice company. They worked on rescheduling loads instead of making you work 20 hrs. (There's one though that they will make you do in Cincinnati that delivers 20 hours after you pick it up which makes your 10 hr break start at 2pm-perfectly legal but really a waste of an OTR driver).

But they just don't care about your safety. They don't want the fines. So that one works out. In one case, they are on the HOS better than any company I have heard of. This helps you want to stay there. You learn to get 3500 miles in a week the legal way. Drive at night, get off the usual schedule. I enjoyed running myself from night back to day. They will get you loads at all hours if you want. They will get you miles as long as you don't work 6am-8pm every day. I'll give them that.

They advertise this superiority over other companies in maintenance. Don't believe it. Trucks that are nice are newer and that's why they are nice. You can get a flat tire changed anytime sure. But one that is bald that slides around in wet weather that needs to be changed. They will rotate the tire around and look for a thick spot and argue with you that it is DOT ready.

I had a lot of trailer tires go flat, but my drives were imbalanced and they didn't get changed until one finally went FLAT flat. Then they said it had way too many miles. Funny, I was arguing with someone in Louisville that it was perfectly fine just a week ago.

I feel sorry if you are still there and are feeling the pressure of costing them too much. This could just be a thing they do to get people to quit. I wish they would have just offered a paycut instead of denying me repairs and just generally acting more and more like morons on the phone. It was clear they didn't want me to stay there and it didn't have to do with job performance one bit.

If you are new to JB Hunt, talk to other drivers (they have good tips and you will have a laugh over the same crap that has happened with them) and be careful what you say and do and look for an opportunity to quit because I have heard it gets much worse the longer you stay there. You gamble along or you chose to save lives and yourself.

Pete

Lowell, Arkansas

U.S.A.