Anybody Work for Schneider LTL?

I saw a couple of those Final Mile straight trucks in Indy recently when I happened to be going through there during the daytime. I think it's a beautiful thing. It keeps some of those garbage freight residential deliveries away from the P&D guys and keeps the shipper honest when they tell the customer it'll be taken upstairs and assembled for them.

 

Yeah Watkins has a terminal in Indy so prob running those trucks out of there.

 

I hope these minimum wage trucking companies keep their minimum wage drivers pulling the minimum wage freight and keep pulling swing door truckload 53' foot junk and leave the ltl stuff to the ltl carries. We don't need our rates going into the dirt

 

But that is exactly what will happen. If you are running your drivers at $20/hour, and I run a bottom feeder company that follows the industry average which runs right around $12ish an hour, then I can afford to undercut you since I have lower expenses.

Same thing happened to us over the past ten years. We used to run 9 driver's full time out of our barn. We had 200 deliveries a day and did close to 60 pickups. We are now down to 60 deliveries and we rarely break 20 pickups. They also cut our work pool to 3 drivers.

All of our freight went to bottomfeeders that ran cheaper drivers.

 

Just because they call it LTL and Schneider owns it the rates aren’t going in the dirt. This is furniture and carpet only and stuff that most LtL carriers won’t touch and furniture companies won’t ship with freight companies because it’s not on pallets. There is big money in this and only about 4 companies that haul it. Furniture is a different kind of freight. And it pays very well to haul. Full loads not so much but ltl stuff these companies are hauling it in. I’m talking 4000-5000 in revenue a load. I’ve seen the info on the computers in dispatch. So I know it’s true. Which is why all companies besides Watkins/Schneider deadhead their drivers back to their terminals to haul more ltl loads.

 

That's good!!!!
Keep rates up. Just say no to cheap freight. Just say no to under .55cpm They put the revenue on the manifest at our ltl company..

 

Unless they can duplicate a traditional LTL terminal network, I don't see that happening. That means national coverage of terminals in every major city of every state in the union including a nationwide system of breakbulks. Which means having enough local pickups to keep inbound and outbound traffic from all of these points profitable. Then hiring enough dockworkers, billers, sales, other support staff, etc.

Traditional LTL is a business with huge barriers of entry. You might have companies like Schneider and JB Hunt getting a piece of the final-mile business, but to think they can compete with established nationwide LTL carriers like FedEx Freight, ABF, Saia, Estes, XPO, etc is not happening.

Think about it this way: when was the last time you heard of a new entrant into traditional LTL? Probably hasn't happened in over 25+ years. There's been buyouts, mergers, and consolidations but no new entries in all that time. FedEx, UPS, XPO with all their $$$$ got into the business not by starting new companies up but by buying traditional companies that had been in business for many years.

 

Schneider also uses lift gate pups and 48's iut of Denver north and west. I thought they were hauling gm parts, but could be other stuff as well. The teamsters voted in a memroradum of understanding. Mou, that allows loads hauled by outside carriers between distribution centers only. This happened when the railroads were busy moving crude oil, and couldn't give service to ltls. They can only move so much and then the teamsters get paid a sum for violating the agreement. Some pull our pups, some leave 53s that we load. Some pull our 53s. The ltl companies need more drivers, but can't find enough.