Coffee sales keep Idaho truckers going

IDAHO FALLS, Idaho (KIFI) - If truck drivers are the lifeblood of America, caffeine is what’s in their blood.

Just about every truck stop in the United States has the same best-seller.

“It’s coffee,” Rusty Berry said with a chuckle.

Berry, the general manager of a Love’s truck stop in Idaho Falls, has been slinging joe to thirsty truckers for over a decade.

“If diesel’s what keeps our trucks running, coffee’s what keeps the truckers going,” he said.“Trust me,” he added. “The first time I let a pot go empty and didn’t have it refilled, a trucker made sure I knew.”

“Some truckers are, like, addicted to the coffee,” truck driver Gurpreet Singh said.

Most truckers will freely admit it.

“If I don’t have my coffee in the morning,” one exclaimed, “I’m not quite right!” “It helps keep us awake and keeps us moving,” trucker Kevin Broner explained.

“You do need it to keep up sometimes,” added driver Chad Whittington. “There’s a lot of boring hours, a lot of miles, lot of white lines going by. It hypnotizes you. You gotta do something sometimes to keep awake.”

As a result, the Love’s in Idaho Falls sold 1,002 cups of black gold over the past week.

For comparison, it sold 537 fountain drinks.Over the past seven days, the store sold 159 small coffees, 154 mediums, and 198 larges. But it sold 491 refills, and customers can bring their own cups for those.

"They come and they fill up a big thermos at night,” said fresh food coordinator Melanie Moore. “They’ll drain our pots within one sitting.”

“Some of those guys bring in a full-sized Stanley cup that they refill every single time,” Berry added. “So even a thousand cups, which is what we’re moving a week, is not necessarily fair, because some of those guys are filling up with coffee every day.”

“Two or three times a day,” clarified a trucker named Mark.

"Usually it’s one of these,” Broner said, gesturing to a thermos, “or it could be three or four of ‘em.”

“I try to keep it to one, but I do two sometimes,” another trucker added. “Probably shouldn’t.”

Thanks to the cup disparity, it’s easier to measure coffee sales by weight. “It’s 45 lbs. a day,” Berry said. “It’s about 350 lbs. a week, I guess,” he continued. “Somewhere in that neighborhood. "That’s an insane amount of coffee.“ It really is!” Berry exclaimed.

Local News 8 asked Berry what would happen if the store ran out of coffee. “We would have…Let’s say disappointed drivers,” he said with a smile.“

You see the memes where they talk about, ‘Don’t talk to me until I’ve had coffee,’” he continued. “Well, if you don’t have coffee, you can’t talk to ‘em! So it’s bad. Let’s just say it’s bad.”

The drivers, though, have a backup plan.“ Well, we’d probably move to energy drinks or something,” Broner said. “Monster energy drinks,” Mark said, laughing.

“The energy drinks would be missing!” Whittington added. “But yeah, it would be bad. It would be pretty bad.”

Moore stressed the serious importance of keeping customers caffeinated.

“You wouldn’t get stuff in your grocery stores because our truck drivers couldn’t get their coffee to keep going,” she said.

“We kinda started to see that when we went into the pandemic,” Berry added. "Like, without trucks, you would see the effect in days.”

Maybe it’s a good thing coffee is delivered by the people who need it most.