Warehouse Storage & Distribution in Buford, Georgia

A 70,000 square foot warehouse, and the trucks to empty it

Davis Delivery Service runs a 70,000 square foot warehouse in Buford, Georgia, and a fleet of more than 50 trucks out of the same building. Your freight comes in, sits as long as you need it to, and leaves on our truck. One company, one invoice, one number to call when something needs to move today.

That sounds like a small thing. It is the whole argument for this page, and the rest of it explains why.

What it costs

Storage is billed per pallet, per month. Handling is billed separately — a fee to receive the pallet in, and a fee to send it back out. Those are the only two moving parts.

We quote the rate rather than publish it, because it genuinely depends on how many pallets you have, how long they sit, and how often they move. A hundred pallets that turn twice a month and ten pallets that sit for a year are not the same job. Call 678-926-3939 and you will get a real number, not a range.

We bill monthly by default. If you need something shorter — overflow space through a seasonal peak, a few weeks between a container landing and a job site being ready — we will build a short-term arrangement around it.

What we charge you to wait: $30 for the first hour

Every carrier bills for time its truck spends waiting at a dock. It is called detention, and it is one of the charges shippers are most often surprised by, because the free window is short and the rate afterwards is steep.

Here is the same wait priced against the major carriers’ own published rules tariffs.

Those figures are calculated from each carrier’s published detention item, applying its own free time, its own billing increment and its own minimum charge: ODFL Item 502, SEFL Item 500, AAA Cooper Item 500, Saia Item 500, TForce Item 500-A, R+L Item 502, ABF Item 500. Check them yourself — every one of those tariffs is a public PDF on the carrier’s own website. Figures verified 12 August 2026; carriers reissue these tariffs without notice, so confirm before you rely on them.

Two details do most of the work in that table. The first is the minimum: R+L bills $185 the moment the clock passes 30 minutes, ABF $97.50, TForce $95, Saia $77, ODFL $50. The second is the increment. Five of those seven round up to a full 15-minute block, so one minute over the line costs a whole quarter hour. We bill the minute you actually used.

What happens when your warehouse and your carrier are two different companies

This is the part that does not show up on a rate sheet, and it is the reason storing where your carrier lives is worth more than the sum of the line items.

Nobody owns the detention. When a carrier’s truck waits at a third-party warehouse, the detention clock is the carrier’s and the dock is the warehouse’s — and the warehouse has contracted out of responsibility for it. The Standard Contract Terms and Conditions for Merchandise Warehousemen, the form most of the industry runs on, says at Section 6(e) that the warehouseman is not liable for “delays in obtaining and loading cars, trailers or other containers for outbound shipment” unless it “has failed to exercise reasonable care.” The default is no liability, and the burden of showing otherwise is yours. Americold, an Atlanta-headquartered warehousing REIT and the second largest cold-storage operator in the world, puts the same disclaimer in its own published terms at Section 10(d), in capital letters. The carrier’s meter runs, the warehouse owes you nothing for it, and the invoice arrives at your desk.

Loading the truck can be extra. Under those same standard terms, handling covers moving your goods to the dock — not loading them onto the trailer. Americold’s Section 7(a) states that handling charges “do not include loading and unloading unless otherwise agreed in writing.” And if the warehouse will not load it, the carrier will, for a fee: Southeastern Freight Lines publishes that it furnishes exactly one person per vehicle for loading (Item 750) and bills extra labor at $145 an hour (Item 560).

Every release is a chargeable transaction. Bills of lading, pick orders, delivery orders, partial-pallet picks, appointments booked at short notice or missed — these are separately priced at most warehouses. One Atlanta warehouse’s published rate card bills $10 per bill of lading and $25 per pick order on top of the handling fee.

Then there is the clock you cannot see. Americold’s terms give it “a reasonable time to make delivery after Goods are ordered out” and “a minimum of thirty (30) business days after receipt of a delivery order in which to locate any misplaced Goods.” Thirty business days is six weeks to find a pallet.

And the commitment is getting heavier. A 2025 survey of more than 600 warehouses, self-reported and run by The Fulfillment Advisor, a service that matches shippers to 3PLs, found the average minimum monthly charge rose from $337.50 to $517 in a single year, that 51 percent of warehouses charge a setup fee averaging $333, and that the share offering month-to-month terms fell from 57 percent to 30 percent. That direction is not accidental. Lineage, the largest cold-storage operator in the world, told investors in its 2024 IPO prospectus that it is “improving economic occupancy through increased use of minimum storage guarantees.” Americold reported that it hit its 60 percent target for fixed-commitment contracts in 2025 — and that its economic occupancy ran 11 points above its physical occupancy, which is another way of saying customers paid for pallet positions they did not use.

One last thing worth knowing, because it is Georgia law. Under O.C.G.A. § 11-7-209, a warehouse has a lien on your goods for storage, transportation, insurance, labor and other charges. If you end up in a billing dispute with a warehouse, the company you are arguing with is holding your inventory and has a statutory claim against it. That is a materially different negotiation from a disputed invoice with a carrier who already delivered your freight.

None of that is an accusation against any particular warehouse. It is how the standard contracts are written, and most operators are simply working to them. The point is narrower: every one of those costs and delays lives in the seam between two companies. Store where your carrier lives and the seam is not there to fall into.

The building

70,000 square feet in Buford, with 13 dock doors. Thirteen doors matters more than the square footage on the day you need six trucks loaded at once.

The building is not climate controlled, but it is heated — we do not let the temperature drop below freezing. So: we will store almost anything that does not need a specific temperature or humidity held. If your product genuinely requires climate control, we are the wrong building, and we would rather tell you that on the phone than after your pallets arrive.

How fast it moves back out

Release an order by 10 AM and it can ship the same day. Most of what we do is next-day delivery across metro Atlanta, with dedicated routes running anywhere in Georgia.

Worth saying plainly what that is being compared to. At a warehouse without its own fleet, “shipped” means staged on the dock for whenever the carrier’s next scheduled pickup happens to be. Here it means loaded onto one of our trucks.

The software is built around you, not the other way round

Most warehouses hand you a login to their system and ask you to work the way it works. We build to what you actually need — inventory views, receiving and release workflows, reporting that matches how you already run your business. If you have a system you want us to feed, we would rather integrate with it than make you learn ours.

What we do with your freight

Receiving and inbound processing. Inventory storage and management. Order fulfillment, including pick and pack. Outbound shipping on our own equipment. Verification and reconciliation, so the count you have matches the count we have.

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