4200 Jobs Cut In Trucking In The Month Of September

Is the trucking industry in a recession?

Nope. Thinning the herd, the smarter, more efficient companies will weather nearly any economy. Those unprepared and without the resources will be consumed or eliminated.

It may seem harsh, but it's the way it is. Adapt or become a footnote. It's not personal. It's business.

Il bite. Im an o/o finishing up year 2 with my authority. In the past few years there has been 2 noticable changes in our industry that is making things quite interesting imo.

First is elds. Not much to say what hasn't been said. Like it or hate it. When they were mandated the industry in fear of capacity spiked rates doubling almost overnight. Many, many new carriers came in the game and by the time the fear subsided the market found itself with too much capacity and the rates sank. Not surprisingly, many carriers leased to companies with contracted freight like the megas and places like landstar because they had contact freight.

Secondly, and maybe more importantly are the new electronic brokering systems. 5 years ago there were basically 2 load boards that had the vast ajority of the loads. In order to get a load you had to call the broker, speak to them, agree on a rate, have the rate sheet emailed over, look over the contract, red line anything you didn't like, sign the rate sheet, email back the contract, and only then would you book the load. Only 1 out of 4 or 5 calls would actually result in getting a load booked and it would take hours sometimes.

Fast forward to today. Many brokers have a point and click app that just show you the reciever, shipper , and the rate. If you like it click, if not move on. What this has done is remove the giant bottleneck that got in the way between the carrier and the broker. It basically gave the brokers to the huge amounts of capacity and in doing so really dropped rates and kept them low.

In the future, in my opinion, it's going to put a lot of pressure on the small to medium sized carriers. When the contracts they have are up, the shippers might just go into the spot market instead of signing contracts because of the ease of finding capacity in today's digital world.

Anyways, that was a lot to say, but it's a very complex and fragile system.