Time to start Houffing -- new gig at Houff Transfer

Abilene was bought by Knight-Swift in 2018, but continued to operate as a mostly independent company thereafter. I was an Abilene employee, not a Knight employee or a Swift employee. I'm sure that we were all on the same ledger somewhere deep in the accounting, but Abilene had its own payroll department, its own separate payroll software, its own separate load planning software, its own separate driver management software, etc etc.

After I did my drug test and road test the other day, I swung back by Abilene's office to turn in my keys. While I was there, I chatted with the operations manager. I said "Okay, look, now that it's all over, and you don't have to shine me on with any BS about the company so as not to endanger my morale...what happened?"

And to boil it down, he basically said that Abilene was a company that had been heavily invested in two major customers. We were basically the private fleet for Hill-Phoenix and Boar's Head, and almost half our loads were for those two companies.

And then Hill-Phoenix decreased production and decreased the loads we were hauling for them. By a lot.

And then Boar's Head had their listeria recall and shut down one of their two major plants near Richmond, which made it no longer profitable for us to run their freight, and no longer cost-effective for them to use us.

And we weren't diversified enough to absorb the lost freight, and couldn't find enough new accounts to make up for the difference. We only turned a monthly profit 3 months out of the past 24.

So Abilene wasn't absorbed by Swift. They were shut down. Lotta folks in that building who had been there for 15-20 years (or more) wound up out of a job.

 

Yeah, I certainly hauled plenty of them myself. But we stopped hauling them a year and change ago when they closed their Jarratt plant after the listeria outbreak. And then after that we stopped hauling reefer entirely and sold off most of our reefers.