How's Everyone Doing in LTL Right Now?

They will put all the ltl's out of business.

 

I have been seeing LTL loads on the Amazon load board since last year and they are actually paying pretty good for Amazon. I don't expect that to always be the case though.

 

While I think AMZ in the LTL space spells danger for drivers’ qualities of life, I think it’ll be a solid value add for their customers.

AMZ may do a lot of things poorly, but one thing the excel at over all is focusing on the customer’s satisfaction.

 

The problem with Amazon is Amazon will willingly do LTL unprofitable and do it that way for many years to force competitors out. Amazon itself was unprofitable for many years after it was founded. From what I understand their own parcel delivery is actually unprofitable. Amazon makes profits now but they dont need for trucks to be profitable. For Amazon trucks are just a means to an end it's not their core.

 

I don’t believe they do any trucking to make money on the trucking. I also don’t believe they are trying to run LTL carriers out however the carriers too dependent on Amazon will lose volume similar to how UPS and FedEx have. The initial intent of delivering their own packages was to save a portion of their delivery costs. Very similar to how Walmart does a great deal of their inbound freight on company trucks. I am not sure if Walmart still hauls non Walmart freight but when I was there we hauled Pepsi from Pepsi bottlers to Pepsi distributors. This product was not destined for Walmart but they were filling empty miles. Amazon started with final mile delivery and have branched out to hauling their own inbound freight and also filling empty miles with non Amazon freight. They don’t make most of their profit on selling products and delivering packages. That is a very good thing about investing with a company who has diversified if they know how to run the non-core business.

 

Oh please, I barely even use Amazon now because of all the Chinese knock offs and junk they sell. It's like walmart on steroids, cheaper crap that falls apart. Not to mention ordering something and it takes 3 weeks because it was fulfilled by a 3rd party vendor shipping it from China.

I hate using scamazon. It's a last choice to get something. I don't have prime and quite a few people I know have weaned off their platform because of the product quality.

 

Your ability to use ecommerce needs some work then, because shipping estimates on Amazon are among the most accurate of any supply chain on the planet and the source of the items are clearly defined on the product page; including whether it's shipping from a non-Amazon shipping center etc. I didn't say that knock offs and junk didn't exist, though. I said their focus on customer service pretty much sets a gold standard.

My wife burns through an average of $1000-1200 a month on Amazon for a wide range of items that the family uses and wants/needs. We've had the occassional order go awry; whether its an item damaged in transit, an item that was previously returned and delivered to us, receiving the wrong order all together, delivered to someone elses house, you name it. We've shopped on Amazon for 10 years or so. Every single time there has been an issue, the phone call to customer service is less than 10 minutes long, getting to a live person with minimal effort, and having a resolution on the first contact. Most of the time, they don't even bother to have us go through the process of returning a defective item. In 10 years of shopping, there has been zero instances of having to dispute a transaction with our charge, and we are a family that spends exclusively on Amex solely for the practically guaranteed fact that a legitimate dispute will end favorably for us.

 

"First time?" - FedEx Ground drivers

 

How much are they paying you?

Sorry, in my experience, Amazon has become more like temu of late. And I'm not the only one.