I just moved out to CO as I medically retired from my government job and took a job at Lowes as a driver. As I was getting trained I was informed that at some point all deliveries would be going to 3rd party only by the other drivers and since we currently split deliveries with 3rd party I asked him and he said its coming at some point but has no idea when.
Does anyone know when they are aiming to countrywide with this and/or what % of the country is already 3rd party?
If you share with 3rd party already then your store is primed for it to happen soon. No one knows when though
Here in Ohio all box truck deliveries where changed to 3rd party. We still have flat bed but I don't know for how long,a lot of rumors.
Wish I knew what percentage of stores have transitioned to 3rd party delivery but I don't know. My store is located in what is apparently a test market for not only 3-rd party delivery but also a cross-dock delivery service. What happens is almost all of the non-install type of appliances (refrigerators, ranges, washers, dryers) are converted to SOE (Special Order Express) and are no longer stocked at the stores. The store invoices via Genesis but the order gets converted into a Sterling order at checkout. The premise is that the Sterling order gets assigned to the cross-dock facility and the appliances are shipped from the servicing ADC (Appliance Distribution Center) directly to the cross-dock for pickup/delivery by the 3rd-party. We transitioned to this "new" system several months ago and it has had disastrous results. Orders getting split between multiple stores (many times with different delivery dates), getting routed in some cases more than 100 miles away, orders getting canceled by stores/cross-dock without notice, etc, etc, etc.
Combine that with a 3-rd party delivery service that can't even remotely hold a candle to the level of service our in-house Lowe's crews use to provide. As an example, I recently had a customer tell me that the delivery service refused to reverse the door swing on a Whirlpool clothes dryer claiming they couldn't do that because it would require the mother board be reprogrammed (I kid you not). We scheduled not one but two additional re-trips and none of the 3-rd party crews would reverse the door swing for the customer. Finally we had to send a Lowe's employee out to the complete the job. And to think Lowe's is actually paying these crews to inconvenience and insult our customer's intelligence. Sadly that's not an isolated example and is becoming almost a daily event.
Customer care issues have EASILY increased 5 fold and appliance sales are plummeting as a result. Last time I checked our store alone was down over 0.75 million over 2018 in appliance sales. We are not only loosing sales but also loosing CUSTOMERS on account of all the BS we are subjecting them to. If corporate is even remotely listening they must realize that their process is critically flawed and if they roll it out nation wide we will be lucky to even be in 3rd place in appliance sales by this time next year. And for anyone in corporate that may be reading this I would L-O-V-E to know what you are doing to fix these issues as you have effectively dropped a nuke on the central part of our state and making both the store staff and more importantly our CUSTOMERS lives a living h-ll with this system. PLEASE HELP and it would be nice if you would specifically address what is being done to resolve this in a future pod-cast. Our CUSTOMERS are waiting for your response!
We’ve only had 3rd party here in AL during peak times of the year when our appliance sales skyrocket. They only did appliances though and didn’t hook anything up so we would have to send driver back out if we didn’t have a truck full of drop offs for them. and the CDO they were trying here was shut down last year.
This has been talked about for years and has yet to come to fruition. In some places they were using a central office to schedule and route deliveries but actually took that away. I just don’t see it coming for awhile still if at all