$1.03 a mile

Could be the load was small and the driver was already going that way with a decent paying load and enough room to throw it on too. Maybe turned his $2/mi run into a $3/mi run. Who knows? Why worry about it?

 

Was probably a 48k lumber load with tarp........

 

I would bet almost anything that it is lumber coming out of the North East. Probley Monson, MA at Globe Transport. Imported lumber from Canada shipped by train to the US.

Even at a $1.03 a mile a mega company can get a 44 cents per mile driver to haul it and still make a profit. See how these brokers love big companies with low paid employees

 

I'd also like to add this. Why with all the lumber in this country that we have to buy it from somewhere else? I know it's a race to the bottom dollar, but there should be something maybe a tax on basically putting American workers out of business.

 

After all of Washington's fires this year there is salvage logging going on right now- but only on an Indian reservation! They are begging for trucks (running over 100/day and need more) and paying well . The State & Federal lands adjacent will not consider it because of "environmental concerns".

 

They import lumber because they can't hardly log here anymore. I lived in Western MT for 12 years and saw 7 big mills within 100 mile radius of Missoula shut down. Virtually every timber sale on public lands in the NW is met with some form of lawsuit from one or more of the "save the planet" groups. Just like now, with all the acres of forest that burned last summer, at a time when the burned timber could still be salvaged, there's dead trees still standing all over the west because they're stopping the logging sales. Have to leave the dead trees standing so there's even more fuel for the next fire.

 

I bought lumber at my last job. All dimensional lumber was purchased from Canada. Much better milling and quality for the same price. I tried 10 or 20 mills all over the U.S. 2 in Canada.

 

Megas don't pull cheap. Any publicly owned company had to post their gross revenue. Trucking companies have to list their miles run. So publicly traded Mega trucking companies have the info listed to see what their average rate per mile is.

A quick look at the numbers and you will see it's not the big companies with 44 cpm labor pulling cheap. It's the small guys with 2500 dollar throw away trucks running those crap loads.

 

Tree Huggers

 

I occasionally consult the MyDAT app for loads if I need to get back to my terminal area in OKC. Hauling flatbed for the oil industry I generate an average of $3.70 per loaded mile.

If I haul to Casper, WY and my company doesn't have a backhaul, I get on DAT. The options are to either deadhead back or find the best paying load to try to generate some kind of revenue and cover fuel for the round trip.

Most of the time I deadhead, unless there's a non-tarp load that doesn't tie up my truck waiting for an unload appointment. Anything to enhance profit at the end of the week.

Cheap rates on load boards are because those are the loads the broker doesn't give their preferred drivers. The good loads don't get on the board. I hauled a cheap load one time, gave great service, and now when I need a backhaul all I need to do is send an email to the broker and within minutes get a pdf file showing her entire offerings and rates to all locations originating within a 200 mile radius. I may need to get to OKC, but will take that $3.50/mile load to Arkansas.

Get to know the brokers, form a relationship. Give great service. My guess is calling a broker just to ##### about rates on one load isn't going to help.

 

I am an agent and will email out loads as soon as I get the call or email from my customers to carriers who have pulled similar loads and did a great job. Lepton is right on that part.
I don't hold back loads, but I will give the carriers I have worked with first crack at them, and most of the time they do take them within 5-10 minutes of the email. It usually takes me about 15 minutes to build the load in the computer so if I have not gotten a response by then, I just hit "post to load board" and wait for the phone to blow up.

***Note-These are not the $1.03/mi loads I am talking about***