I have two customers who own major trucking companies–one on the east coast and one on the west coast. I’m sure you’d recognize their names.
They both told me last week they can’t fill their trucks with freight and they are not even making enough money to pay for the fuel. They say freight volume is down over 50%.
Consumer spending has fallen off a cliff. We are headed for some trouble.
Via email, from a contact in the industry;
It’s as bad or worse than 2008.
The market overall is horrible. Freight volumes have plummeted, especially since May and they haven’t come back.
LoadLink is an online system trucking companies and brokers pay for to post extra loads they don’t can’t move themselves, or look for loads when they need one. Freight brokers are also on there. When I post a load on there within 3 minutes my phone and email lights up. I posted a load the other day and one caller wanted to run a truck 1200 miles empty from Texas – usually a very busy area – to get it because his truck had sat a week already.
Vancouver has always been the busiest area for trucks in Western Canada. Normally on any given day there will be 200 loads on LoadLink looking for a truck to move it to the prairies. This past summer there weren’t any loads available at times and as high as 2,200 load postings of open deck trucks looking for loads to the prairies. It has since stabilized somewhat since then, but still far from good.
The bankruptcies and layoffs are everyday. Freightwaves.com covers them well. They are out pacing 2008. Freightwaves.com is the best source to get a pulse on the industry.
All my customers are cutting back and laying off. Caterpillar’s orders are down so shipments are down. Everyone is slow.
Trucking is always the first into and the first out of a recession and right now we are in a horrible recession. There is no end in site. In past recessions there would still be upticks for the summer construction boom; the sawmills would be scrambling to find trucks, steel I-beams, construction equipment moving. etc. This year the mill in Meadow Lake had a waiting list of 71 carriers – all with multiple trucks – looking for loads. One sawmill customer of mine in BC closed down. The economy is collapsing.
Stateside: “It isn’t just in the trucking world. It is also in air freight and in the rail industries.”
Not yet!
Still looking to buy a television for Black Friday…
Nooooo.
From what I’m reading, stateside is actually much worse. I’m with a very good small company out of Manitoba. Her scheduling is excellent, usually you have a reload coming back to the prairies before you’ve even left.
I know things are slow when I don’t have a reload after I’ve emptied out down south. Last week I sat for a day. For the most part she avoids loadlink/brokered loads. The spot market rates are the ones that drop first and the deepest.
Equipment is extremely expensive. A new truck with new flatbed trailer can set you back 350k. Combine that with more emissions garbage than ever. It’s sad that you need to stay 100% busy for 5 years to pay off a truck.
Luckily I own a paid off truck and trailer. I do my own work and get decent MPG. I will be fine, but I cannot say the same for my peers.
Also, Texas is very hit and miss for Canadian bound loads. It can get slow when everywhere else is busy. It can get busy when everywhere else is dead. It’s not a good example for the overall state of the industry.
Gee, won’t Modern Monetary Theory save us? Digital currencies? Maybe Universal Basic Income?
Have central banks stopped printing money?
Good sarcasm there. Keep it up.
The comments following the article are very informational. Yeah … we’re in trouble. It’s almost as if … we are gonna need a bigger war … than Ukraine … to pull us out of the coming Depression.
I’m assuming ‘bigger war’ is sarcasm.
I don’t think the US has the manufacturing base to support a bigger war for any length of time.
We will retool all the high tech programmer jobs into “smart bomb” developers … then have all those dullards in flyover country build the bombs … by retooling the Dominoes pizza ovens into hot composite plastic extruders…
Oh wait! Nevermind … we’ll just have AI fight the BIG WAR for us …
Won’t the Tesla semi solve the trucking problems? (Sarc).
I wonder what payload capacity vs battery range trade off Musk is making. Or will his truck just haul batteries around the country.
Will railroads put long haul electric trucking out of business?
When the Tesla electrotrucks start rolling … will they have priority at all the Tesla superchargers? Will they get to cut the line we saw extending 25 cars deep in Burbank, CA in an earlier video? How long to recharge the trucks? 48hours?
Sadly … the younger generations have been taught to believe in magic. That if they wish something to be true … it can be. Laws of physics, chemistry, math, or biology be damned. So they “believe” electroautos are viable.
It is the same in the oceanfreight industry. The Christmas rush this year didn’t materialize at all. Warehouseman and drayage companies are starving for business. I assume the DC centres are too.
I just bought a gas fireplace to install before CA bans all new gas appliances forever. When the freight company delivered it (within days of ordering it) … I was shocked to see that there was NOTHING else in the BIG box truck that delivered it. Nothing but my fireplace strapped to the far back corner of the truck. Nada. An otherwise empty truck. The freight company must be LOSING $$$ making deliveries like that in CA with our petrol/diesel prices
Well hoss, it’s at least POSSIBLE (more likely probable) that your fireplace just happened to be the last item left for him to deliver at that time, before heading off to pick up a new load.
Did you ask the driver?
Thank your governments for the coming disaster. Vote harder next time.
Higher interest rates are finally having an impact: they are pushing the marginal consumer decisively out of the market.
I’m not even close to a marginal consumer and the whole family has cut back on spending, massively.
You would be a fool not too.
Isn’t this what they want? We will own nothing and be happy? Don’t need trucks to bring our daily supply of nothing each day. We’ll be lucky if a partly filled food truck drops by occasionally.
Socialist/communist utopia at it’s finest, here we come, like the Clampett family to Beverly Hills.
Maersk the worlds largest shipping company is laying off thousands .
Biden is the sabot thrown into the gears.
I deliver truck parts to truck repair & collision shop for a dealership in the Greater Toronto Area and have noticed a significant decline in orders in the last 2-3 months. Several of my customers who typically service 6-15 trucks at a time are lucky to have half that many in their shop at any given time. The dealership I work for has 23 service bays and last year every bay was constantly occupied. Lately, the shop is half empty more often than not.