Crete will destroy your trucking career.
Pros
My asset manager was great!
Cons
The following review is based on my personal opinion. Crete is stuck in the stone ages. Antiquated detention pay policy and ELD equipment. No immediate detention. They are using out of date android tablets to track ELD hours. These tablets are always crashing and/or freezing. No GPS in trucks. Yes I use a paper atlas but the paper atlas does not tell me if theirs an accident on my route 50 miles away. No PrePass. That’s right. You will be pulling into every single weight station with a broken tablet so sending your logs to DOT was always a crap shoot and DOT cops love seeing your fisher price Peoplenet tablet. You are guaranteed a ticket here. All trucks have a speed limiter at 65 MPH. So when you get behind a truck going 63 you’re gonna have to ride side by side with them in the ticket lane for a while before you can pass them. Sometimes you don’t pass them. They hit a small downgrade and you are both neck and neck. Limiting a semi to 65 MPH is one of the most dangerous situations you could ever put a driver in. It forces trucks to drive side by side and infuriates motorists. The cars get impatient and perform risky maneuvers to get around us. With other freight liners I could double tap the gas to accelerate to 68MPH so I could pass other slow moving vehicles. Why do Crete trucks not have this important safety feature? Crete trucks also have a system on the trucks that hits the brakes automatically. This is so dangerous! As many other drivers have already reported this system will slam on the brakes anytime you drive under an overpass. You will have zero cars in front of you and it will slam on the brakes creating a situation where the semi driver could be rear ended. I have gotten whip lash from this thing hitting the breaks on its own unexpectedly. Safety is not a priority at this company. They have trailers all over the country that need maintenance but they don’t pay drivers to bring them in. You are expected to take trailers in to be repaired but the company will not pay you to do that. So they are banking on you needing that empty and at that point you risk getting a DOT violation or bringing that trailer in. I came to Crete because they offered a higher cents per mile than the last company I worked for but I was actually taking home less money at Crete because for one youre gonna have to pay 20.00 per month to get your own pre pass. The health insurance for myself alone was crazy expensive,they charge you for Per-diem and make you sit for free to get loaded/unloaded. they don’t really run you OTR here although thats what I was hired to do. They keep you in one region and zig zag you in that region. Drive about 300-400 miles per day getting live loaded and then live unloaded and all that time you sit they won’t pay you a dime because Crete doesn’t pay detention for the first 2 hours and after that it’s 15/HR. What year is it at Crete?1990? Then come winter they try to force you to run dedicated Walmart. A Walmart driver makes 87,000+ per year but they want you to do the same job for nearly half that. When you go to Crete Walmart dedicated from OTR right off the bat they cut your stop pay in half and make you do all your first stops for free. I thought the guy was joking when he told me that. Why would anybody work here? Also you have to do your DOT physical with one of Crete’s Doctors. You can’t go to your own doctor. Even if you offer to pay for your own physical. If you are even a little chubby the Crete doctor is gonna tell you that you have sleep apnea. Even if you get a letter from your own doctor saying you don’t have sleep apnea they won’t accept it. This place will hurt your trucking career and pay you peanuts disguised as a higher than average CPM while doing it. Way better companies out there that are more safety focused and offer immediate detention. The CEO at Crete seems to be more concerned with making himself Facebook famous than brining his company into the 21st century. They will try to force you to work Walmart dedicated and if you decline they threaten to fire you. I had to move on from Crete. They lie in the ads that say you’ll make 80,000 per year. Gimme a break. You’ll get good miles for the first 6 months because you are new after that you get garbage loads. You’ll be lucky to get 2000 miles per week. Crete has been hiring for 30 years. Always looking for new drivers. The good companies are not always hiring. Don’t believe the hype folks. Crete is not a good company. Crete moves a lot of consumer goods so we go where the people are. Big cities. Dallas,Memphis and all of the North East just to name a few so more often than not you will have to pay for parking. Once you have to do that a few times per month it adds up. In 2 months I spent 90 dollars in parking. Sometimes no matter how good you plan, things will happen that you cannot control. Things come up that will delay your day and you’ll get stuck having to pay for parking if you are in a big city. Why not offer to pay for parking when you know your driver is going to a big city? Nope. They would rather that you find an unsafe parking spot or pay for it yourself. Working weekends at Crete was always a reminder that the company lacks true leadership. Clearly the weekend staff is incompetent and overwhelmed. Weekend after weekend you leave the truck drivers of this country stranded with no support from dispatch. Why? Because Tim Aschoff is too cheap to adequately staff the place on the weekends. This has been a problem for a long time. Why take the proper steps to fix the problems that are right in front of you instead of just ignoring them? The bottom like is that Tim Aschoff is cheap and greedy. Broken tablets,broken trailers,broken weekend staff and shady doctors.
