What are the issues with brokers?

Brokers

Never get sick n they are never late fir anything they are God's u worship them

 

Brokers

 

Someone put tql out of business

 

2022 TQL Xmas bash

 

My problem is brokers not speaking English well enough for you to understand then they want to get mad and cancel the contract since you can't understand them...or they want to call us the drivers constantly or expect us to text them while driving to get an update on our location...GOT NEWS FOR YOU! That's what a dispatcher is for. Most trucks have a ELD/Tracker so instead of calling us and making us perform dangerous acts call the dispatcher and SPEAK ENGLISH CLEARLY!

 

You're calling on loads and the broker doesn't speak English well enough for you to understand? Sounds a little skep, how does he call the customer and get the freight then? I do not know one single customer i've ever had that would work with someone that doesn't speak English, French or Spanish fluently, they just dont have any time to deal with it. I now get calls from Landstar but the agents aren't even in the USA anymore.

 

Well I'm still having issues with brokers. Had 3 loads this week (all from the same broker) and every one of them were at least 4 hours late, and one of them was a whole day late.
The issue is the whole broker system. On time sensitive loads, why do brokers promise a rate and a delivery time before they even have a truck to cover a load? I know exactly what happens, a broker quotes a rate and agrees to make a delivery time, and then they can't find a truck to cover the load. That is when the lies start.

I'm not going to go so far to say all brokers are trash, but the vast majority I've dealt with have been. Honestly, I've been dealing with TQL with loading and unloading some of their loads, and they have always be honest and on-time with the ones we've done.

 

Let me first explain that as a broker, we are at the liberty of our customers. IF they tell me a load is ready and i find them a truck and send it down to the border, but when the truck gets there, they have to wait 12 hours for the Mexican truck to cross... I did my job and sourced the truck, i cant help that for any number of reasons there is a hold up somewhere along the lines.

When i send in a bid on 100 lanes, and they come back and say no, we need to be at this much lower rate, what other option do i have if i want to keep my customer but to take some #### lanes for #### rates?

"The issue is the whole broker system" - What other system would work better? I know the customers i deal with dont want to talk to 300 truck drivers a day, they dont want to vet carriers, set up their insurance, track 1000 loads a week, deal with insurance claims or deal with some crazy Russian guy yelling at them. Customers have all of the control. Customers - the shippers, buyers, growers, etc - have all of the control. They use brokers becasue we focus only on the trucking market which allows them to focus on other things. Cheaper to use us as well - we often understand rates/markets better than them, we negotiate on behalf of them, and we are a safety net for claims with them. If some idiot, just graduated 2 week trucker school driver runs his reefer on start-stop/cycle instead of continuous and ahs a 50,000 claim, who covers that loss? Certainly not the customer/grower/seller and certainly not the carriers insurance since its driver negligence and not a reefer breakdown. We just had a load flip over on the highway and the carrier just up vanished. Lied to us all morning about delivering the load and then ghost... insurance no where to be found either.... who pays that 50k ? I do out of my pocket.

"a broker quotes a rate and agrees to make a delivery time" - I have a set amount of loads to cover for my customers each week, so i know what lanes i have for next tuesday already.

And one last thing, i talk to so many scammers and double brokering turds every day it boggles the mind. I have spread sheet with 100 fake broker MC#s and 1000+ carrier MC#s that are just the Armenians in the greater LA area. Not even counting everyone in ChiTown or Calcutta. No way in hell the largest trailer manufacturer in the country wants to deal with all of that, so the farm out the leg work to brokers so they can deal with it and be liable when a trailer goes missing.

 

Why r u using brokers then?Why r u not working directly with carriers or are you trying to operate cheaper then a carrier with a good reputation would cost you.

 

I don't use brokers personally, but where I have to deal with brokers is when my customer books the load. I price most of these loads for either us to haul or I have other reliable carriers that I deal with directly, but it is my customers that try to save a buck though a broker and I end up having to deal with them, because we are the ones actually loading or unloading the load.