Yellow Freight closure thread

Crazy thing is back in 2015 I actually wanted to go to yellow. Had an uncle that worked there forever and retired in 2017. He always had nothing but good things to say about them. He had a huge house (over 4300sqft), cars, properties etc and all I knew was he worked at Yellow. He was also one of my motivations to get into trucking. I was literally SHOCKED when they went under.

 

"Never ascribe to malice what can be explained by stupidity "

They tried to do a cash float to make the balance sheet look better, which isn't a great idea even if you have a solid financial reputation. They didn't, and got called out by everyone plus Great Aunt Sally.

They were already in a death spiral and the creditors recognized that the goose wasn't going to lay any more golden eggs, so slaughtering while it was still fat made more sense.

I doubt management really understood how weak their hand was.

 

What gets me is all the regionals were PROFITABLE. Every single one of them. Why wasn't YRC forced to sell them? It pisses me off to no end that you had customers, drivers, management, and vendors that were loyal and could have kept everything afloat but because it was tied to Yellow, they had to sink too. It's like having a parent with stage 4 cancer and saying "well, ya know, I'm not going alone and will take the kids down with me too". It makes no sense. The regionals were run and managed independently and could have continued as business as usual. I know in the very very last few months they tried to merge it all together, but aside from the stupid logos, the networks were still intact.

 

The problem was the debt. When the regionals were acquired it was through debt financing. Say it wasn't yrc, but an independent group of investors. Not one of those companies would have fared any better by themselevs with the heavy debt load that came with the acquisition. They all would have had cash flow issues. Its the problem with leveraged buy outs.

But let's say it was feasible to split them off - who's buying and how fast can they put together a deal? It would take at least 6 months, probably closer to 18 to come up with a solid deal that would allow the regionals to survive, and I don't think anyone would be interested in paying market value for them.

 

Use the word management very looseliy.

 

Seems like there could have been a better way...........
The estate has sold nearly $2.4 billion in real estate since the liquidation began. It has also terminated leases on other properties.
Court approves Yellow Corp. terminal sales totaling $10M - FreightWaves

 

Of that 2.4 billion they have just over 600 million left, Yellow would never have made through the current freight recession.
Once they started using the regionals as colleterial there was no separating them from the parent the whole One Yellow thing was to get rid of work rules from the national and to pick and choose the regional work rules they wanted. Starting at REX in 81 I had 42 years in when they went under, I really couldn't believe they made it that long. I watched as the better drivers got out as soon as they could some went to other professions some just retired.
In the end there was a group walking around everyday with a F Yellow attitude that trickled down to the new hires as the junior men got screwed everyday.
When we finally combined to form YRC I ended up in a terminal that was former Yellow and 3/4's of the former Yellow employees had the F Yellow attitude didn't take long for the better managers to head over to the competitors, sales people went to competitors or brokers.
In the end there were still some good people there but not enough to make a difference.
Senior management waited too long to combine the companies, waited too long to rebrand the company and when they did they picked the name everybody hated.....

 

I was a salesman for an LTL at that time.
I remember going into a traffic managers office where he said that both YRC and Rdwy were just in his office (at different times) and soliciting his business. It was insane.

 

Did you see that some courts of appeals or whatever brought back the lawsuit that Yellow filled against the Teamsters? Apparently some judge wrongfully dismissed it too early and now this is all going back to court. One really would think that this would all wind down and make it's way out of the news cycle, yet here they are again to drag another thing out.

 

Dumbest move ever we each could see they others rates and then sent a salesmen in to undercut the other.....