Opinions on Brokers

My unbiased opinion:
They may seem to be greedy, but this picture is magnified by our imagination. The rates are the freight market product. Ordinary Freight Brokers living standards should not be that different from ordinary O/Os living standards. I can see an owner of a small brokerage to be on par with an owner of a small trucking company. They might as well be neighbors in the same neighborhood and their wives driving the same Honda Odysseys taking their kids to the same schools.
Their biggest mistake is very clicheish; they take cheap freight and then try to sell it cheaper.

 

I have a broker that lives 3 miles from me. Nice house and a Mercedes in the driveway. Now, he could get foreclosed on and his car repoed tomorrow. But for now, he's living large.

 

I always figured that ANY outfit that used the word "broker," in the name, was just being honest. Whether freight broker, real estate broker, "fine used automobile" broker or whatever.
Dealing with them, always leaves you "broker" than you were before dealing with them.

 

I had the same situation. It could mean that some of them might be on a commission, just like real estate brokers, who get paid a percentage on a sale.

 

No offense meant. It was supposed to be a funny.

 

Why would you piss away your work and efforts for 5% of a load brokering it? That's ridiculous. We're all in this to make money not barely scrape by with minimal profit. What are you trying to be uber freight?

And what is wrong with a broker going to the shipper that paid them $800 saying that $1,400 is what it's going to take? That's the broker's job as far as I am concerned. I don't give one rat's ### what any customer gave a broker and you can ask any of them that have freight within 200 miles of my home 20 and they will back that up.

Their job is to make the shipment move and find out the rate that does it. If my rate is more than the shipper paid up then they go do their middleman job and tell the shipper.