ATLANTA — If you're out shopping on Black Friday, remember to thank a truck driver.
The truck industry is indispensable when it comes to keeping stores stocked and the flow of goods moving - truckers move more than 70% of the nation's freight every year.
Right now, they're facing a major shortage - and regular Americans are feeling the impact.
Back at the beginning of the pandemic, 11Alive's Christie Diez met three truckers who were describing the challenges they were starting to see. More than a year-and-a-half later, Christie went to check back in with them, and found just one of them was still trucking.
Steph Tatum drives heavy haul, and in fact just transported a car wash to Lawrenceville. He said the last year has been rough for a lot of reasons.
Most recently, it's the strain on the supply chain affecting truckers.
"The drivers are waiting for hours at a port," he said. "We have a 14-hour day we have to work with, so if you're at the port and you're spending six hours waiting for a chassis, you only have so many driving hours left and you're not gonna make a deadline if you had one."
His colleague, Corey Parker, said he recently had to wait 22 hours for a poultry pickup.
"Yeah that was fun, they didn't have any kind of facilities for a restroom there, sitting there waiting for 22 hours," he said.
His only option for relief in that whole time? "Bottles," he said.
These are the sorts of problems truckers have always run into, to some extent. But the federal vaccine mandate has created a new one.
"A lot of truck drivers are not vaccinated, and a lot of the big grocery stores, packaging plants, won't let unvaccinated drivers go in there," Tatum said.
There's also growing concern about a Biden administration policy set to go into effect in January that will require anyone crossing land borders into the U.S. - including truckers who have carried goods into Canada or Mexico and are on their way back - to be vaccinated.
Meanwhile, according to the American Truck Association, the industry cannot afford to lose drivers - it's currently short about 80,000 drivers. And without action, that number is expected to double by 2030, meaning nearly a million new drivers will need to be hired and trained to keep pace with increasing consumer demand.
But finding a new driver is only half the battle. The trouble is keeping them.
"If you look at the large employers of truck drivers, the annual rate of turnover is 90%," U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said on Meet the Press last weekend. "That tells us that there's something deeper going on than any short-term fix is going to address."
Earlier this week, Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp met with leaders from the trucking industry to talk about solutions. Some ideas include lowering the age to get a commercial driver's license, removing unnecessary taxes or suspending the federal vaccine mandate.
Drivers say something's gotta give.
"I mean you can put all the bonuses out there that you want, but if you don't have a certain mindset of a driver out there to do it, it's useless," Tatum said.
Added his colleague, Parker: "The economy dies when trucks stop running."
In addition to all these industry pressures, drivers continue to cite a No.1 problem that affects them doing their job day-to-day: Disrespectful and dangerous drivers on the road.
The truckers said they're out there trying not to kill people, and other drivers swerving in and out of them doesn't help with their stress.
They ask everyone to give them room to do their job on the road.
Watch Christie's original report on trucking in the pandemic, from April 2020, below: