Half crossed America and met me

Editor’s Note: Our columnist Richard Lottendress is traveling this week in the United States to better understand the stock shortages that are disrupting the supply chain and its effects at home. Follow his reports on TVA and LCN and his columns in Le Journal.

Being a trucker is not that easy these days. Delivery Delay: What exactly do they do? Shortages in Grocery Stores and Stores: Where Are They? Rising prices: This is definitely their fault! And then there’s the storm of the last few weeks around the mandatory vaccination. She didn’t even mention the job of shooting the man.

To understand where supply chains are broken, you need to find the so-called Washington, deep America. Travel to the Midwest and Iowa for a truck stop on the endless Interstate 80, starting in New York and ending in San Francisco.

Not any relay: the biggest in the world! This is exactly what happened in 1964 when Bill Moon set up a garage, store and restaurant. The relay is not known to be the largest on the planet, but its parking for 900 truck-trailers, its fifteen diesel pumps, the 500 employees who go there every day, and 5,000 visitors is entitled to this claim.

Breaks of the pandemic

Bill Moon’s daughter Delia Mir has been trying for the past two years, and she now manages it Truck stop. “For all intents and purposes, the epidemic has shaken us, but perhaps even more, she insisted.

Over time, she learned about truckers, with them. So she and her team, a few days later, started calling them one by one. “If you need to adhere to a‘ social distance ’, it is very easy to do so at the largest truck stop in the world. This is where you want to be! ⁇

And they came back, relay’s turnover was 90% of what it did before the epidemic. To see, to question the drivers, they were eager to get back on the road. “I love my job, a driver told me. It’s the freedom it gives me and I love getting paid for it!”

Ah, this famous freedom!

The word is overused, though it does come naturally in the mouths of truckers. One of those who explained to me that companies always offer lower prices to drivers, I asked why choose such a life: freedom. “I am my own boss. I get it when I want it. I traveled as far as I wanted. ⁇

“My dashboard and my windshield are my office,” said another driver, who was very happy to travel with his wife today, having traveled alone for years. Most people are not so lucky.

This is also one of the reasons that explains the difficulties of recruitment: we often spend weeks away from home. For this kind of life you need a certain character and it seems that there are more and more people who allow themselves to be tempted. Freedom is no longer enough.

About Iowa 80

• Not half the distance to the United States …
• 15 hours from New York and 29 hours from San Francisco.
• Founded in 1964 … they are about to receive 4^And 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.