Dead Markets

You sound awfully commmunist. Imagine if you were working an assembly line and said that. People might even call you a radical!

 

It depends a lot on how many loads you run per day. Say you run a same day and a next day, same numbers on each to keep it even.

500 x 14 = $7000 gross
115 x 14 = @1610 miles. Say 2000 miles with deadhead.

7000 gross on 2000 miles ain't bad. Low cost of operation = higher profit margin.

 

There are a lot of Owner Ops and such that don't have the mindset of one who is successful. They don't learn and grow. They accept the same rates year after year after year and think it's good enough. They're not interested in earning more. Seriously. And the same brokers call them day after day looking for their truck and the owner doesn't even think to ask for more because he would feel greedy.
And he doesn't know to ask for more because he doesn't study the markets. He doesn't research. He lives in a bubble.

These are the ones who will be hurt the most by the ELog mandate. Many of them run 4-5000 miles a week. They won't know how to change their business model to make the same amount.

To be able to separate your personal self from your business self is one of the hardest things I've learned out here, a concept that I never would have even known about until I've been in the situation.

 

Yeah that's what you'd assume... but a lot of them seem awfully ok with losing roughly a truck day for 500 dollars in revenue.

 

That isn't communist at all. It's a very capitalist thing to do. OPEC does it all the time. They increase or decrease crude oil production to move prices, albeit on a much much larger scale. And me stopping my truck isn't stopping anyone else from doing their job. I really wonder how you come to the conclusion that a business choice made by an individual entrepreneur or entrepreneurs would be considered communist. It's a contradiction.

 

You don't get two loads per day in the ELog era.
Not anymore. Unless it's a local company with drop and hook and a yard, and it doesn't necessarily need to be there tomorrow.

When I get called with a short cheap load, I tell the broker that they need to call a local company.

 

I had some downtime last week because of some rain... so I spent my time watching a nature documentary on Netflix called 'The Hunt'. The thing that really jumped out at me was how hard these animals had to work every day. I mean all of them. The predators are straining on the edge of survival pretty much once a year at least. In a lot of ways we're all animals. We've all found a strategy that has gotten us this far... But a lot of the time the moves that got you from A to B don't really work for B to C, and you fail and have to start over. Then you do A to B again (a little easier this time because you've done it before) and then try to do B to C the same way and fail again. Some people do this their entire lives.

So much of life is just perspective. The older I get the more I realize just how little I know. And I'm a guy whose life didn't even really start (like seriously it was awful) until he got paid to think. Even those of us who think we are super sophisticated are actually just ducks. Terrifying super predators if you're an insect, prey to a whole different group of animals.

 

Hahaha

Even this Monday I took a load from MI to Atlanta. A to B. Last time, B-C didn't work.out too well. This time it didn't either. Lol.
It's not easy out here. I'm trying to learn every day.

 

OPEC is a bunch of far left radicals too. didn'cha know?

 

Yeah I've never quite understood why it was ok for businesses to collude with one another (like they absolutely do in a totally unregulated market) but it wasn't ok for workers to organize into unions.

In reality economic collusion is really bad for everyone but the people doing the colluding. I think a lot of people would be shocked by how much collusion (particularly between big companies) is going on in our economy. Situations where 4-5 big companies have 95%+ of the market share and won't compete with each other on price...

The reason I'm against unions for all but the most downtrodden workers (Like I think that all unions with memberships who make more than x amount should be automatically shut down) is because two wrongs don't make a right. More collusion isn't ever going to be a good answer. And yes there is a huge difference between people who make 11 bucks an hour slaughtering chickens getting a union for a few years to get the safety and pay situation handled and the UAW strangling the big 3 for the last however many decades.

The reality is that capitalism without competition is no better than communism. It's the competition that causes all those wonderful free market effects to happen. This is why we should all be very concerned with how little anti trust action there has been in the last few decades. With great size comes the opportunity for tyranny.