Abt Delivery and Service Fleet Facts

Abt is basically your friendly neighborhood electronics and appliance store, but with a neighborhood that covers thousands of square miles and a four-state area. Although there’s only one Abt, as we’ve grown, so have our delivery and service operations. What started with a few deliveries a week has grown into a bustling machine that makes somewhere between a quarter and a half-million visits to customers’ homes each year. Here are some fun facts about Abt’s delivery and service departments.

About 40% of Abt’s employees work on the road—there are 570 people in the delivery, service, and installation departments.

Every one of those employees hits the road in one of the 382 vehicles in the Abt fleet (including four semi-trailer trucks). This summer, we’ll be adding another 74 delivery trucks and vans to keep up with our growing delivery numbers.

The fleet is maintained by four full-time truck mechanics in our own fully-equipped service shop. There is also an onsite gas station.

While the amount of deliveries and service calls varies from day to day, there are usually anywhere from 1,200 to 1,500 total appointments each day, five to six days a week. On 3/22, we had 773 deliveries and 635 service calls.

Our delivery and repair services are officially available to customers within a 100-mile radius of our Glenview, IL showroom. But we’ve been known to go beyond that on occasion, having traveled as far as Madison, WI; the Upper Peninsula, MI; and near the Iowa/Illinois border. Deliveries to customers in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Indiana are done on Tuesdays and Saturdays.

We’ve recently begun offering same-day delivery on certain items to customers located in closer proximity to our store.

Our techs have been flown out to perform high-end installations in customers’ homes in locations too far to drive.

Not in our local delivery area? Abt delivers to out-of-state customers in all fifty states, Canada, and Mexico, via UPS or freight carriers.

As the signs in our store say, “The answer is always ‘YES’ to any reasonable request.” That applies to our delivery services, and occasionally even includes maybe not-so-reasonable requests, like delivering heavy, high-end appliances to the kitchen on the upper level of a customer’s home, which couldn’t be reached via traditional methods because of a narrow staircase. Instead, we went top-down, and got the Sub-Zero and Wolf kitchen appliances into the customer’s kitchen by lowering them through an open skylight.

While we’re always adding qualified personnel to our fleet, we also have a large number of long-time delivery and service techs. Many have worked at Abt for more than 20 years, with a few having more than 30 years experience, and one who has even been at Abt for more than 40 years! Next time you see one of us on the road, be sure to wave!