Choosing A Company Is Like Choosing A Dishwasher

I saw this video today and it reminded me of how people read reviews on trucking companies to try to make their decisions.

Sears Home Appliances – Experts You Can Trust 

Have any of you trusted "peanutbubbles44"?

Sure! I you read/saw it on the internet it's true, just because it is!

Think:

Rub some diesel fuel on sore joints, they'll be better within 4 hours.

Uh Huh!

Oh yes I trust those sears employees know what I need... yup... as they try to sell me something 5x as much in cost as to what i actually need.

unless they have their employees test drive each and everything they sell I refuse to believe they know any better than me being able to read the spec sheet myself. That's pretty much all their doing and if option b is better than option a why even sell option a... your employee is gonna tell me how much i need b and that it's what I should buy... basically your employee is going to try to not sell a... so having it really is just a waste of space and money for the company.

uggghh i hate these kind of commercials... but that's also why I only ask for employee help if I need it... and frankly I trust peanutbubbles44 more than the employee... at least he/she used the product the employee just compared specs.

That's exactly how a lot of people choose things. They get opinions from some random knuckleheads whose knowledge, integrity, and true identity is unknowable.

That's exactly how a lot of people choose things. They get opinions from some random knuckleheads whose knowledge, integrity, and true identity is unknowable.

which part of the commercial are knuckleheads.... the sears employees or the reviews?

in reality i prefer reviews BUT take them with a grain of salt. my reasons are stated in previous post.

The problem with getting reviews is you have no idea who the person is or whether or not the review is legitimately helpful. Nowadays on the Web you can buy as many 5 star reviews as you like. Anything from book or product reviews on Amazon to the same on eBay, "Likes" on Facebook, app downloads and reviews on Google Play and Apple's App Store, etc. The systems have been manipulated to the point it's difficult to know if they're helpful or not.

Not only that, but all these years I've read people's "reviews" of schools and companies and found that most of the time they're complete garbage. They're gripe sessions which often times have little basis in reality. They're simply one person's side of the story, and that person often has a gripe which you have no way of knowing is legitimate or not.

Now if you want to find out what life is like at a particular school or company then speak to the school's current students or the company's current drivers face to face. First of all, you want to make sure you're getting genuine reviews from people who would actually know. Secondly, you want people to look you in the eye and give you their opinion. People have this unfortunate tendency to act entirely differently when they're anonymous than they do when you're looking them in the eye. I don't know why that is but you'll see what I mean when you listen to the racist, disgusting, degrading things people say on the CB and then walk into the truck stop and realize those same people will hold the door for you, smile, say hello, and be super friendly. It's an odd thing, but it's very real.

Https://youtu.be/aG2FzQbcxqY

I agree with most of that brett but I also think for example of trucking companies, if they had 100 bad reviews and 2 good reviews and those 2 good ones are 5+ years old and 80 of those 100 bad ones are in the last year, then it's probably safe to say there might be something wrong with the company. I don't just read the ones that say "this company is garbage, pay was crap, not enough miles" because that really doesn't tell me anything constructive, it just tells me you didn't like it a better review even if negative would be "this company committed acts of discrimination, not letting me do this because i was female or senior, the pay was only 10 cpm starting with raises once every 5 years, I was lucky if I averaged 800 miles a week"

see the difference in kind of reviews i pay attention to? the ones that give information as to what exactly they didn't like about what was bad for them as opposed to just saying they didn't like something. the ones that don't offer anything constructive to base my decision on i simply ignore but i still wonder when a company has a whole lot of recent bad reviews even if non constructive what the reason for that is, i probably won't base my decision on them but i am going to do further research to see what's up first.

Phox, you also have to consider the number of reviews you're seeing. The major companies have many thousands of trucks and have been around for 50+ years. Even if you read 50 reviews and they're almost all bad I can promise you from my years of experience with these large companies that there are far more than 50 drivers at these companies at any given time that are miserable and have no one to blame but themselves. They might be argumentative, lazy, unreliable, or relatively unsafe. Maybe they won't run at night. Maybe they won't run the Northeast. Could be a million things.

Another thing to consider is that these companies all have the same bills to pay in order to survive. They all have truck payments, fuel costs, labor costs, road use taxes, tires, repairs, and regulations to stay in compliance with. If a company didn't have good miles available they couldn't make their payments and stay in business. So you know there's plenty of freight available overall.

If these companies were truly abusive in some way their turnover rates would be so much higher than everyone else that their recruiting costs would bury them. Not only that, but streams of lawsuits would be filed continuously and no country in the world has consumer protections and employee protections like we do. They simply wouldn't be able to get away with it for long.

If their equipment was terrible it obviously wouldn't be passing inspections. Their CSA scores would quickly drop precipitously and they would start receiving warnings, fines, and eventual shutdown by the DOT if it got to that point.

I could go on forever. But let me take this approach to it....and this isn't just for Phox....this is for everyone:

[if their reviews are overwhelmingly bad]...then it's probably safe to say there might be something wrong with the company

What is it you think might be wrong with these companies? I mean, just about everyone coming into this industry obsesses over which company they're going to start out with and I've always been puzzled by that. They all obsess over avoiding "bad companies" and finding "good companies" but I've never been able to figure out what they think a "bad company" really is. What do you think a "bad company" will do?

Do you think you'll be thrown in a Turkish prison?

Will they confiscate your home and vehicles while you're away?

Will they kidnap and export your children for sale to a foreign government?

Honestly I'm not sure what people think they have to look out for. As I've said, if a company has been around for 50+ years and they have several thousand trucks then obviously they're making enough money to thrive in this industry. It also means they have great equipment, they're in compliance with industry regulations, and they have plenty of freight available.

What else could you ask for?

The Federal and State oversight in this industry is incredible. The compliance book from the DOT alone is literally over 1,000 pages. I have one and you almost need a forklift to move it around. And every state has a book of its own laws and regulations on top of that.

Then, as I mentioned, there are countless controls in place to protect employees from fraud and abuse. If there is any type of fraud or abuse it normally winds up in a lawsuit which is public knowledge.

So my question to everyone is this: What do you fear may happen if you choose a "bad company"?