negotiating rates

Picked a load yesterday in SoCal. 6k lbs easy 1k miles in my dry van at $2,700 to get me home for the weekend. I had my doubts about the delivery time being an ""Open delivery 0800 to 1600" listed on the ratecon. Been to the consignee many time and know that they use set appts.

After I picked the load, the brokerage house called to confirm if I had picked up the load. This is after I had already sent an arrival & departure email to the agent, who in turn acknowledge such. Anywho, I questioned the broker rep about the delivery time. He said he'd confirm it and get back to me. Well, I was right. In fact, the receiver's next open appt was Tuesday morning.

The broker said, "gee sorry man, there's nothing in our contract that allows us to compensate you for the extra day"...

To which I replied, "I will be contacting my lawyer Monday morning and will instruct him to place a lien on the load and I won't release the product until I'm compensated for storage and TONU."

I've never heard a guy shift gears so fast in my life, LOL. "We'll pay you $600 more for that extra day."

Received the updated ratecon with the appt time and number within 5 minutes. Which is all good, because I really wanted to take Monday off anyways

 

I just learned a new language....

 

Man, that #### always astounds me. It takes thirty seconds prior to putting a load up to call the consignee to find out if they run appointments.

 

First off I want to say that I used to be a dispatcher and I'd probably take Scooters exact line with all but the biggest brokerages in this spot. It is pretty important to remember to have all your ducks in a row before doing this. You need email proof of everything if possible. The line between what Scooter did and holding a load hostage is pretty thin. What Scooter did is fine, but change a detail or two and suddenly he's got a TIA writeup and a truckstop write up that won't go away because they have the documentation to back it up... For hijacking a load.

In this situation what puts Scooter in the right is that the appointment date on his rate confirmation is wrong. If the RC is accurate in this situation Scooter just hijacked a load. You can't make the move he made because you've been waiting at a DC for 10 hours after your appointment time. You need paperwork that backs your story. In this case Scooter has emails and the RC to cover his ###.

Hijacking a load is pretty much a deal breaker for every brokerage out there. Seriously it's one of the unforgivable sins. Just knowing you're capable of doing that for sure (I suspect everyone has a point where they will just go ahead and hold the load hostage... but I need to believe that that situation hasn't come up for you yet) makes you a TERRIBLE risk decision. I literally wouldn't use one of those trucks at 4pm with a hot load I was responsible for. The more leverage you give them the harder you're going to get screwed.

 

Seriously. The reality is that he knew that he didn't have an appointment to that DC. I wouldn't be shocked if his customer had told him that they had some kind of agreement with the DC going to take it when it arrived. In his shoes I'd have offered to pay something if Scooter actually rolled into the receiver on Monday morning and had to wait all day. Why? Because I think the customer was telling me the truth when they told me it would get a fast work-in.

If the broker was just lying through his teeth when he booked the load to be lazy and get a truck that wouldn't have said yes to say yes... yeah he really made the bed for himself didn't he? So he started things out by telling an unnecessary lie... and finished by massively misreading the situation during the damages negotiation. Given everything in Scooters post I'm basically 100% certain he'd have taken way less than 600 if he hadn't been pissed off by the broker trying to blatantly screw him.

There's a lot wrong with that situation lol. It's like a what not to do list on being a successful freight broker.

 

Ignore those guys. They are scalpers. Yes they make more money per loaded mile than you do, but they are the first to sit empty when the market goes down. It's high living for them right now, but the market will be significantly lower at some point in the not too distant future.

They also have no idea about long haul rates lol. None at all. They might be right that it would have been a good financial decision to stay in the midwest and take shorter loads for a few days before heading back west when you got a really good offer to go back that way, but that's the decision they are saying you should have made. They run 300-500 miles per day and think that if they drove 800 they should make a similar amount more. Running congested regional routes in the midwest/northeast isn't exactly the same thing as the wide open road is it? In reality a long haul driver who does 800 miles a day usually makes the same kind of money as a regional guy who spends his whole life waiting for chicken plants to load his truck and cold storage places to unload it. Personally I think the 800 mile a day guy might be significantly happier. But I'm sure that's down to the person.

You DO need to learn to look at freight markets though. For starters you need to expand the size of your load search when running coast to coast because dead heading 300 miles to get an extra .50 a mile is absolutely worth it when the lane is 2200 miles long. Take the information on what the best available load within say 300 miles is and use that as a guide for what you want to get from where you are. Call and offer a comparable rate to the people on the board in order of distance from you. You won't have to go 300 miles to get a yes.

Don't forget to check the load board for the market you're going to either. If it has a lot of decent loads be willing to run there for less. If it has almost no good loads either don't go there or get paid enough money to drive empty to the nearest place with better freight, or enough to make the crap loads on the board acceptable when averaged with the load you're hauling in.

Definitely be open to changing your plans too. You want to be as flexible has possible, because there is a very real bump in pay to being willing to go wherever the desperate man needs his load sent.

 

The REASON why he agreed to give up the extra $600 is because he knew the mistake was on their part. The lady who built the load in their system didn't follow through and verify the appointment. That's on them, not me or anyone else.

If they had answered their phone at 4:55 PM CT (their time) when they stated their hrs of operation are M-F 8 to 5, the issue could of been avoided all together. No way I could of called the consignee myself because they don't make appointments over the phone (by email only) or with the driver himself.

When I called at 4:55 PM, someone answered the phone and I could hear they were watching or listening to a broadcast feed of the Cubs/Nationals playoff game. They hung up the phone, when I tried to call back, no one answered. That pissed me off to be honest with you.

Unfortunately, sometimes those kind of mistakes cost more than a "we're sorry!"...

Truth be known, the extra 6 bills they gave up was probably their cut on the brokerage side.You know how many times I've heard, "we'll make it up to you on the next one"?

Not that big of a loss, especially in light of the fact that they really didn't need the shipper sucked into the matter. That could of made them look bad and jeopardized their ability to do business with that shipper again. They keep a sheat list too, you know.

I realize this post is probably more detail than necessary, however, these are the kind of things we deal with out here as owner operators. It's usually not just one thing that precipitates an event like the one I described, it's a series of things that compound the matter and leads someone like me to do what I did.

I'm all for pragmatism, until it hurts my pocketbook...

 

Hijacking a load seems a sexy thing to do. I could only bluff... not so much out some fear to break some laws but because of my limited capacity. I need to go empty ASAP, otherwise I am stuck and time wasting, not earning. Pragmatism. To tell you the truth, my biggest fear being a single owner operator with one trailer is that I am stuck somewhere for a number of days because there is an appointment screw up. Home Depots, Walmarts, Safeways, Krogers, Amazons.... Or there are some rejected pallets or cases, and nobody knows what to do with them. However, in my 15 years of driving, such screw ups were only about one day or two...at the most. Rejected cases were ending up in the nearest dumpster most of the time.

I also added one more line in that negotiation dialog: "Who's the shipper and receiver?" Amazon? Kroger? Pay me "x" amount more please. No? ...I pass, Thank you.

 

This is where you need to a good list of warehouses before the situation arises.

 

What's your definition of a necessary lie?