Traffic Department

The Kole Imports traffic department is one of those areas that no one pays much attention to unless something goes wrong, and fortunately that doesn't happen very often under the direction of Barbara Greene.

“We do all different kinds of shipping,” says Barbara. “We have full container loads that go out of the country, so we are exporting. We also have container loads that go by rail to various customers, and others that go on the road if it's a rush shipment. My job, primarily, is to keep all those balls in the air.”

That includes keeping freight costs as low as possible. “Any time you work with carriers, particularly LTL carriers, you operate under tariff, so we need to keep our rates as low as possible while at the same time providing service to our customers as to delivery,” she points out.

A tremendous focus for the shipping department is moving a tremendous amount of freight in and out of the building in a timely manner. Dealing with specific “ship dates” is a constant challenge but one that the department embraces as they strive to meet customer's expectations. The amount of pallets moving out of the building each day is remarkable and there is rarely a day that things don't move according to plan.

Another area where the shipping department excels is in organizing consolidations for truckload orders that are leaving our building. Often times customers will load a container at our building and have other vendors deliver dollar merchandise that the shipping department will coordinate. This is a tremendous help to one dollar store customers as it allows them to reduce their freight costs while knowing that our shipping department will handle the consolidation for them.

“We like to think of our department as a well oiled machine firing on all cylinders to insure that our customers end up happy with the way their order was handled from start to finish.”