Truck Load Rates Halt 8 Week Slide 2.0

I can’t tell you what the rates were for truckload freight because I was driving for a flatbed company that only did heavy loads in the Northwest. I want to say he was running 13 or 14 trucks at that time and normally we were home weekends. We went nearly 8 months where there was at least one truck sitting somewhere on any given day of the week, and if you didn’t have a load to get home for the weekend he was buying motel rooms. I didn’t have any weekends spent sitting empty but I did have a few where I was on the road and not home. The worst for me was I left on Sunday to deliver Seattle on Monday morning. Got unloaded and headed back out to North Bend to get a parking spot because dispatch said it wasn’t looking good. I was holed up at the T/A until Thursday when she finally came up with a load out of there, and I ended up delivering in Missoula on Friday morning and going home for the weekend. Had the whole week tied up doing a 1000 mile round to Seattle and back.

 

Rates back in 2008 hovered around $1.50 to $2.25 a mile. I worked for heavy haul specialized carrier. Most of our work in 2008/09 was repoing used construction equipment. In 2008 companies did massive layoffs, companies went under or merged with larger carriers. The company I was with went through three rounds of layoffs, I survived all three cuts, but would sit for days in truck stops because of no freight, or freight that payed so poorly, we refused to haul it.

 

Buck fifty was normal. Buck sixty-five was probably avg

 

I can say, in 08, I ran 135k miles, an all time high, grossed $203k an all time high, spent $92k on fuel, another all time high. Roughly $ 1.50 pm all miles. average $3.95 per gal. 5.8 mpg. The next 2 years weren’t so good. Imagine that.

 

If you worked your butt off the last 2 years then you can afford to sit and only pick freight very selectively. Grossing little and earning little but enough to cover the essentials and not wearing the machine down.
Also, doing due repairs, upgrades and replacements.
That's the idea but the problem is about the slow times duration and how long an individual o/o can remain in the state of full or partial hibernation.

 

Spot market is very poor that I can tell. You can tell peoples eagerness and sometimes desperation to get a load from our brokerage. On our trucks if we come off customer load then it’s a very unhappy time. The bottom feeder brokers are already targeting customer freight and trying to drive the rates down.

No summer surge that I can see so far. Just a hard acceleration downward.

 

I'm wondering if the crash will come hard and fast this time around thanks to $5 fuel. Unlike truck and trailer payments, fuel bills are due daily or weekly and if you don't have any go go juice your stuck. And if your getting a 40% fuel advance on breakeven rates it's not going to get you too far.

 

As fast as things are crashing, and accelerating towards crash faster each week, I’d say it’s coming much much quicker then I’ve seen before. As most know the more desperate people get, the harder and cheaper they run. It’s showing right now for sure.

 

Yes it’s just odd. The volumes still seem to be there (I run reefer) but rates sure don’t reflect it. In the reefer world I think it’s combination of things from a never ending winter, bird flu and more capacity.

There’s definitely going to be a lot of carnage and the ones that survive can hope it’s a quick death for the under capitalized so supply can get back to demand and it’s not a prolonged freight recession (as they are calling it).

 

Yeah I hear you for sure. One thing to look out for in the coming months is the results of China being locked down the past month and who knows for how long. You have a future lack of materials on top of already shortages, you have increase in fuel prices, increasing interest rates, low supply of world food, it seems like a perfect scenario for stagflation where costs continue to rise but the economy sucks at the same time. It could get way worse then the 2019 rates were seeing right now.

I agree though, maybe it’ll be a quick blood bath and then we can get back to business. As horrible as that sounds.