Blind BOL

Had one that picked up in Tampa, FL and delivered 7 miles down the road. They were loads of flour going to some food manufacturer and my customer was a food broker that was posting loads on GL for a while. It was a blind bill usually to show it was coming from Atlanta or beyond. I am surprised the receiver never just went to the flour mill in Tampa and asked to buy direct. Perhaps they did and were turned down as someone mentioned you have to agree to 500,000lbs a year or something. As for the mill you couldn't miss it in Tampa with 4 huge silos over by the cruise terminals...not sure if it is still going or not as I heard the city was trying to force them out to the burbs at one point even though they had been there 100 years.

At $300 - $350 the loads were worth it, once they found somebody to do it at $200 I never saw them posting those again.

 

I do a fair amount of blind shipments for a few different reasons, none of which are to cheat the customer out of freight.

Almost all of my freight is bought on a delivered bases. If you deliver steel to your local steel mill, chances are the freight was included in their purchase price. Say they paid $0.18/lb. 2 to 3 cents of that price is freight. But the steel mill bought it on a delivered basis, so he doesn't care if the freight costed $0.01/lb for a local delivery or $0.05/lb for a longer trip, he just cares what he pays in the end, that 18 cents a pound.

 

Prepaid or Collect
Prepaid means shipper pays.
Collect means receiver pays.

 

Those silos at the ports contain chinese product sent usually from Argentina or where ever.
Heard this on Rural radio.

 

So, when FMCSA shows up at your office and you have a load picked up in Seattle but your log and fuel show that you picked up in Portland, how do you convince them that you really picked up in Portland? Or, when you have a load of produce going to L.A. and your BOL says came from Salinas but really came from Yuma, dont the California Produce cops get upset that you brought a load in from another state?

 

When you pick the load up you are given a BOL with no destination so you have proof. When you deliver you use the blind BOL