How's Everyone Doing in LTL Right Now?

1000-1200 a month on Amazon? Wtf? I'm genuinely curious what the hell you could possibly be buying on there for that much, that often.

I don't spend half that in a year on Amazon. I only use Ecommerce for #### I can't buy at a local store. Online prices aren't the deal they once were and with surge/variable pricing, can often be worse. I usually just buy food and groceries. Random tchotchke is a rare and limited expense. If you take rent out, i don't spend 1k a month on all other expenses.

Guess I should t have underestimated the American consumerist's ability to be materialistic.

Landfill fodder

 

I've never been to Temu so I don't have a frame of reference. Assuming you mean more chinese junk for sale, I believe it. I'd probably guess that eBay has become similar as well.

It's pretty easy to spend that amount and even more on a monthly basis. I support a family of seven people total and a large percentage of purchasing through Amazon is in the form of groceries via Whole Foods. Generally speaking, between the in-sinkerator, recycling bin and burn barrel, very little from our family ends up in a landfill.

Say what you will about Whole Paycheck being overpriced and catering to granola eater stereotypes etc., but I think most people would agree in some fashion that our food supply has some serious problems due to how we've tampered with it. That applies to genetic modifications, pesticides, or otherwise.

My son's bout with one of the rarest and most aggressive forms of pediatric cancer during the COVID years upended my life. As time has gone on, and our life has stabilized, we've continued to advocate for other families that are pediatric cancer victims, and we've noticed a lot of correlations to the American diet in general. We've moved away from consuming hyper-processed and shelf-stable foods and decided that given what we know, it would be less expensive overall to eat healthier, higher quality foods, primarily in the form of organic and non-gmo foods. I don't care about the 'sustainability' aspect that many do.

You're right that online shopping isn't the bargain that it was at one point. That's a side effect of government regulation, card processing fee increases, and the general increase of COGs as a whole. For my family, buying the quantities and products we do from Amazon and Whole Foods may come at a higher dollar cost, but after figuring that the typical grocery trip which was once a 2 hour trip (after 30 minutes of a round trip drive), that expense affords us an additional 104 hours of time NOT spent at a grocery store which we use for being at sports and school events with our kids. Given my current salary and that I work about 35 hours a week, that equates to more than $13k worth of my time not wasted in a grocery store, annually. All told, I probably come close to (if not more) that being spent as an added premium to how we purchase, but the savings no-longer comes at the expense of my time, fuel, or wear and tear on my vehicle.

Maybe instead of 'underestimating' the consumerists you think you have perspective of, you could dial back the overestimation of how you think the thinly veiled jabs will land to a total stranger.

 

I'd rather not support 7 people or give money to billionaire pedophiles. Also, genetically modified foods is conspiracy theorist nonsense and processed foods is another misconception. Processing foods doesn't correlate to unhealthy or healthy. Just hippy fear mongering. Whey and Casein protein are ultra processed but neither are unhealthy. Anthrax is unprocessed and natural but easily fatal. Eating junk food didn't give your kid cancer. Most of that marketing around whole foods is nonsense to sell their markup. They get the same #### from the same suppliers. You just get to feel better about being lied to and paying higher prices.

I also don't understand where these numbers for savings of 13k a year or 100 hours spent grocery shopping are coming from. You say you go to whole foods but aren't spending time there. I assume this means you pay for a delivery service? If so, that's cutting into these savings. Additionally, shopping after work on the way home cuts out the travel time. 2 hours for a grocery visit on a weekly basis also seems arbitrarily high. Shopping at whole foods when you have a family of 7 and also on a weekly basis is incredibly inefficient as well. As much as I hate Costco, you'd be served buying supplies monthly in large quantities from a warehouse type deal like Costco or Sam's club.

After all of your points of justification; it further reinforces my opinion that the American consumerist at large is yet again a money burning chump. All I see is mental gymnastics on how spending more money at whole foods actually saves 13k dollars and 100 hours a year and how it's actually okay because, "sob-story my kid has cancer because of junk food." Even though that overpriced #### is the same crap sold at every grocery store just with different packaging.

It's your money though, waste it how you want to and retire when you are old and croak behind the wheel driver. I'll do the smart play and not having a half dozen people to support on my dime and funding a bunch of pedophile billionaires that want me as a slave because they can sell me worthless landfill fodder. I'll take my money and keep it. #### the system.

 

Nobody here doubts it'll be good for AMZN shareholders (eventually)

 

At what point would you all consider Amazon a monopoly?

 

The business world we live in is constantly changing and the companies that adapt survive. Trucking is different today than it was in 1987 when I started in LTL. I really don’t think there is enough profit in LTL that Amazon will look at trucking as a stand alone revenue stream. If it was that great UPS would not have sold UPS Freight because UPS knows how to make money even with the loss of the vast majority of their Amazon volume. Amazon will definitely look to fill out their existing network with for hire freight when their network is not full with their own inbound freight. Look at how big the Walmart fleet is and even Walmart still has to use contractors to haul inbound and occasional outbound freight. While Amazon is a different business model than Walmart they generally do intelligent things with their money like Walmart and UPS. I don’t foresee Amazon as a stand alone freight carrier as a revenue stream, but one never knows what will happen.

 

When you can’t buy your stuff elsewhere. As easy as Amazon is to buy from I buy from other companies if the price is better.

 

"Stuff" is a lot of discreet markets.

Do you think Amazon doesn't set prices in a one of em?

 

I do see the potential for profits in trucking related companies like this company they bought. I even see these robots loading and unloading UPS and Fed Ex trucks and planes one day.