STOP RUNNING CHEAP FREIGHT!!

I do have skin in the game because if my company is making just barely enough to cover fuel and keep the lights on then that doesn’t leave much to pay me then does it? Then if they're just one major breakdown away from bankruptcy that doesn’t provide much job security.

 

That's the unfortunate reality people are facing now. We'll see if it self corrects by driving out smaller companies reducing competition but that's pretty much what it is. Starve out the little guys while the big guys profit on volume.

 

Same reason someone might bring up Karl Marx when discussing communism. Those are your prominent free market advocates. They wrote the most popular books on why the pursuit of "self interest" is noble somehow and why business owners should have unlimited "economic freedom" to effectively enslave the masses and establish a modern form of feudalism.

 

So here's what happens with the load. The manufacturer seeking the absolute lowest possible shipping rate on a load they're sending out will get 12 different brokers for that load. Whichever broker gets them the lowest price gets the load. Once the lowest bidding broker gets the load and takes out his cut he'll post it. Usually by that point it's not a carrier but rather another broker who ends up booking the load. That broker will then relist the load at an even lower rate. Sometimes that happens a few times before the carriers get around to take their turn at underbidding each other.

 

I did address supply and demand. If Bret's pizza is in an area surrounded by hundreds of other pizza places and none of the customers care anything about quality, only the absolute cheapest pizza they can get as the rent on the location keeps rising and the cost of ingredients keep rising it's probably not going to be a sustainable business and any employees hoping to make a decent living at my pizza place are out of luck because there's not much left after expenses for payroll so even if I really wanted to pay them better I can't while still being able to sell super cheap pizzas to stay competitive. That's called over saturation which pays directly into supply and demand dynamics. What supply and demand means is that if supply exceeds demand then prices are low, conversely if demand exceeds supply then prices are high. This is why I'm so against mass immigration. When you mass flood the market with cheap foreign labor you put downward pressure on wages. At the same time when you mass flood the limited amount of available housing you drive up housing costs. These elements combine to make a decent standard of living less attainable to the working class.

 

Of course because they leverage economy of scale just like the mega carriers. You can run cheap freight profitably when you have 40,000 trucks as even a small profit from each truck adds up to alot. Especially when they're able to self insure and have their own dedicated shops to handle the bulk of their maintainanence.