Editor’s note: Our columnist Richard Latendresse is traveling the United States this week to better understand the stock shortages that are disrupting the supply chain and whose effects are felt right here at home. Follow his reports on TVA and LCN and his columns in Le Journal.
It’s not easy being a trucker these days. Delivery delays: what exactly do they do? Shortage items in grocery stores and shops: where are they? The rising prices: it is surely their fault! Then there is the storm of the last few weeks around compulsory vaccination. Not even to mention the job itself which burns her man.
To try to understand where the supply chains have broken, you have to find what is called, in Washington, deep America. Traveling to the Midwest, Iowa, to a truck stop on the endless Interstate 80, which starts in New York and ends in San Francisco.
Not just any relay, however: the largest in the world! This is what has become of this piece of land where Bill Moon set up a garage, a store and a restaurant in 1964. Not sure that the relay is indeed the largest on the planet, but its parking for 900 truck-trailers, its fifteen diesel pumps, the 500 employees and 5000 visitors who pass there every day give it the right to this claim.
THE BRAKES OF THE PANDEMIC
Photo Richard Latendresse
Delia Meier, who now manages the relay.
The past two years have been trying for Delia Meier, daughter of Bill Moon, who now manages the truck-stop. “As for everyone, the pandemic has shaken us, but perhaps even more, she insists. We depend on truckers on the road and within two weeks, mid-March 2020, it all came to a halt. »
Over time, she got to know them, the truckers. So she and her team, following a few days, started calling them, one by one. “If you need to keep ‘social distancing’, it’s easy to do so at the world’s largest truck stop. This is where you want to be! »
And they came back, to the point where the turnover of the relay is 90% of what was done before the pandemic. Easy to see, to question the drivers, they were eager to get back on the road. “I love my job, tells me a driver. I love the freedom it gives me and getting paid for it! »
AH, THIS FAMOUS FREEDOM!
The word is overused, and yet it comes up spontaneously, naturally in the mouths of truckers. One of them who explained to me that the companies offer ever lower rates to drivers and to whom I asked why then to choose such a life impulsively retorted: freedom. “I am my boss. I get up when I want. I ride as far as I want. »
“My dashboard and my windshield are my office,” said another driver, very happy today to be traveling with his wife, following years of traveling alone. Most are not so lucky.
This is also one of the reasons that explain the difficulties of recruitment: we often spend weeks away from home. You need a certain character for this type of life and it seems that they are more and more rare, those who allow themselves to be tempted. Freedom is no longer enough.
About the Iowa 80
- Not quite halfway to the United States…
- 15 hours from New York and 29 hours from San Francisco.
- Established in 1964… They are regarding to receive the 4e generation of truckers.
- For 50 years, 3.5 million cups of coffee and 19 million eggs for breakfast.
- The relay is open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
- An average of 5,000 visitors stop there every day.