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Paying route drivers


cvending

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We have always paid our drivers by the hour. We are now rethinking this policy. We have over the years lost good drivers when they have found other jobs that pay a little more. We are just trying to protect the time and money we have invested in training our drivers. Have you tried paying drivers by commission? If so, how does that work for you? Is it strictly commission or hourly plus commission? How hard was it to implement? Thanks for any input.

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I paid my drivers a flat salary and then supervised their stales.  I didn't worry too much about stales though as we had a ton of high volume stops and I already knew that food machines had lots of waste.  I trained them to fill the slow machines to par values including the food machines.  We would also modify the par levels when necessary as I would always review their historical route cards for that reason.  I had considered moving to the commission route but it was going to be very labor intensive at that time as it was before implementation of hand helds on the routes.  After extensive reading about it I thought about using stales, sales increases, cleanliness standards and shortages for the commission part but couldn't settle on just one area to base it on.  At the time many large vendors were using salary plus commission or straight commission but it just didn't seem like it could add enough to the bottom line to make the extra work worthwhile. 

 

As I said, I paid a flat salary for as many hours as the job took with 5% increases every year.  When they were hired they were told that the job was a salary for 10-12 hours per day, 5 days per week.  I trained them for two weeks myself and then they would get a daily number of tickets for all the stops they would have.  While training they would learn the order of the stops by the way I ran them but once on their own and because I paid a salary, I knew legally that as long as they got all the stops done I had to let them do them in whatever order they chose.  I was also flexible with their start times and they all had keys to the warehouse.  I had no problems with the IRS or the labor department because of the autonomy they had.  I did lose drivers when they found better paying jobs but that was just part of the gig.

 

I also learned big time to not pay by the hour because then the drivers would dog it during the day to get the higher paycheck.  I found that close supervision of salaried drivers to be the best way for me.  People would say that a salaried driver would work too fast to pay attention to the details but with supervision it wasn't much of a problem.  I was at many locations every week doing my own service calls and I would inspect every machine at each account I did calls at.  I would also purposely set suspected thieves up with salted machines or by counting their machines down just prior to them getting there to see if my suspicions were correct.

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Canteen pays by commission. Route drivers that have been with the company 3 years make 8.25% of sales from their machines. It does give an incentive to pay close attention to what your accounts want, but it's pretty unfair to certain routes. ( Especially the outlying routes, the ones that are far away from the branch. ) 

 

In a perfect world, I'd pay route drivers a very low base rate, and add a commission on top of that. So they have incentive to do a good job, but don't get screwed by drive time. 

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Around here it's my understanding that Canteen grossly underpays their new drivers, provides less than adequate training and sometimes doesn't even have a proper route vehicle for them to use.  I haven't heard anything positive about the way they handle drivers yet.  They're just too big a company to care anymore, it seems.

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I've never worked for Canteen directly but have worked for a Canteen franchise. The drivers got paid 8% of net sales with. $500 minimum salary if sales aren't where they need to be. Most routes would generate $8-10,000 per week in sales on average. Some more, some less. They would offer retention bonuses, attendance bonuses, and had fairly decent benefits. The only unfair advantage would be the difference in pricing at certain accounts like prisons with high pricing due to high commissions. That benefited the driver of that route very well. Then some accounts would have very low pricing. Some drivers would be doing the same amount of work for less money.

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I tried a salary but it didn't really get me anymore loyalty and in low cycles it really drove up cost. So I am now back to hourly, I can control labor costs much easier. I also pay a good bonus twice a year depending on route profitability. Bonuses have ranged from fifty cents an hour to $3.50 for a top performer

 

I too have lost good employees to better paying jobs. The very best employee will always seek out the very best opportunities.

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