The four day work week isn't guaranteed. Sometimes you'll be expected to work on a random Saturday/Monday, or both. I worked two 6 day weeks in a row during my tenure.
When I was hired, I was told I'd be given a driver's phone and a keycard for warehouse access. Neither happened in 6 months. And while every other beverage company equips their drivers with electronic handhelds and thermal printers to do their orders, Breakthru Beverage hands their drivers a large stack of papers in the morning. Every pickup/refusal/breakage/etc has to be manually written down by hand. Doing this all day adds up to a lot of wasted time that could have been used making deliveries. This goes hand in hand with my next point:
DRIVERS ARE NOT PAID BY THE HOUR. Read that again. You are paid one flat wage for the entire week, regardless of how many hours you worked. This incentivizes drivers to get their routes done as fast as they can because the longer they're out, the less their labor is worth. This results in corners being cut. However not delivering an order to a customer is seen as unacceptable, even if the customer location was closed and nobody was there. You're expected to sit around for 30-90 minutes until somebody decides to show up. Or you could come back later, which could mean up to an hour of extra time because of how the stops are routed. To repeat the above, DRIVERS ARE NOT PAID BY THE HOUR and any time spent not delivering orders is time wasted. If you do decide to not deliver a closed customer in favor of customers that actually are open, that order will most likely get added on your route the following day regardless of how heavy it already is. In addition to all of that, sometimes your truck will not be loaded and ready when you arrive in the morning. So then you have to wait, sometimes for hours. Once your truck finally is ready, you're now several hours behind in your day and missing dock times causing you to work a very long day due to no fault of your own. And again, drivers are not paid by the hour.
The pay for this position is very low in comparison to other beverage companies that perform the same job. $850/week before taxes. This is troubling because some customers are ordering over $50,000 worth of product on a single order. When asking management on ways to advance the ranks or earn more money, you'll be told "go help other drivers when you're done and pick up empty kegs". Helping other drivers is a $35 bonus. Not that it matters since you'll NEVER have time to help other drivers once you finish your own day. Picking up empty kegs is $1 and some change. Every route is different, but I rarely had more than 10 empty kegs per week, closer to 5. You can also bring back empty boxes for a bonus but why bother when you're only getting $0.10 per box. Basically, Breakthru has little intention of rewarding drivers for hard work and expects them to go search for extra money out in the field by themselves.
Breakthru seems to have adopted a business model of hiring as many candidates as they can with no intention of retaining while squeezing as much labor out of them as they can before they inevitably quit. I saw several employees come and go in just 6 months and it's not hard to see why.
