Brokers need to be taught a lesson

Your hands are full with that guy.....I do some work for a shop in town when there truck is down they run two routes per day one pick and may have two drops are ten when they call I say 'you want a hour or day rate' $125/hour or $1,000 a day last time I did it I ran 58 miles total that day.....I would do that everyday if they asked.

 

It only gets worse.

 

You could ask him to do the circles around the warehouse till they call him.

 

You have to be careful making assumptions. I know of brick loads moving right back to my home town and other local towns from some outbound areas I can end up at. Sometimes when I do the math these loads would actually hurt my rate per mile. Sometimes it might add a few pennies. A calculator is always your number one tool. Bricks are crappy, heavy and have a tendency to be on the truck for 18 hours or more counting time usually wasted getting loaded (used to haul bricks as a company driver). The pittance extra gross revenue is not worth the trouble or the heavy load stressing my equipment. And if I pass over a crap load like that keeping the truck empty/available chances are good I'll get a profitable after hours load from usual contacts or elsewhere anyways. If i have a load on my truck more than 12 hours it's either long haul with a great rate or a turkey I wished I hadn't booked. To try and pad a gross revenue with a stupidly cheap load would likely cost me a good one. If a good one never materialized I've lost nothing, certainly no time or headache. The lost out gross is not worth the blood pressure problems from giving a free ride and allowing a broker with already cheap $2 a mile freight keep 50% of the rate by getting it moved for a $1 give or take.

 

Trucking is an imperfect world. There is a lot of crappy freight out there for dry vans. The crappiest of the crap are typically your cheap fuel money loads. Would bet the ranch that you haul them often and lose a lot more days than you gain. I come out ahead of you because in my model freight doesn't stay on the truck very long and I have good regular contacts to the point I can usually get a great load in the middle of the night if I want one. They will pay my price to move the truck so while you're sleeping overnight for fuel money I'm making a profit on my load. I need to tally up 2013 numbers. I know I am close to 30% deadhead last year and almost $2.40 a mile to the truck hub miles pulling a dry van - that's after 11% came off the top. I could have padded the gross with cheap freight but I hate giving free rides, wasting fuel, wearing out tires and brakes for some chump broker's sake.

 

OK, it just got better. We called the driver with a R/T that would have taken 3-days. He was initially excited because it had over 1,000 miles on it. When I did all the miles since he started including this load it would have been over $4/mile. But then he realized he would be right back where he is sitting he wanted me to guarantee that we would have a load back home. Told him not sure about the load but worse case would be driving home MT at his daily rate.

He turned it down and drove home MT for free. Then he says "I'm going to say this real slow because you seem to be an idiot. I don't make money sitting or driving MT."

I give up.

 

this is why I started the other post " O/O need to be taught a lesson"
Im a big dummy, I aint the guy to teach anyone a lesson , but sometimes someone will say somethign to get you thinking.

 

If you told an O/O that you would pay 1000.00/day to sit at the truck stop they would want detention on top of it. That's why I go in real early in the morning and leave early. Easier to handle when you're home.

 

Unfortunately getting guys to say no to cheap freight is near impossible. You have guys like the ones who responded in this thread who really care about the industry and want it to be a better place for the single truck owners and little guys, and then you have the many others who have no clue and believe they are going to run out and get rich. As fast as they fail new ones replace them and they are around just long enough to make it harder for the rest of us. We can preach say no to cheap freight until were blue in the face. Its like those foolish emails that circulated around the internet 6 or 7 years ago telling everyone not to buy gas on a certain day of the week. It would really hurt the oil companies and show them a lesson and they would HAVE to lower gas prices. Im sure they got a kick out of it.

 

No kidding, had one that had a 200-mile, 3-day load that canceled. He wanted dry-run on top of the 2-days that we paid him THEN booked a cheap load for today rather than sit and get something or not.

And we had two in Detroit take cheap freight home. We could have run them on this all week. And they had only been out since Thursday.

O/O's are their own worst enemy.