Independent truckers see end of the road

Because a salesman(broker) is good at what he does and gets a shipper to pay an excellent rate and he reaps the rewards of his hard work, skill, and experience, that means he is automatically scum? I think your OPINION on this matter is short sighted at best.

The broker didn't hold a gun to your head and make you haul it for that rate. Nobody made you use brokers. Nobody made you get authority or even drive a truck for a living.

If your business model consists of trolling load boards and calling brokers for over 50% of your frieght, then the problem with this is YOU. Your business model is broken.

The way I see it is you can do two things. First you can get off of your butt and go find your own customers thus eliminating your little problem(cheap brokers). Second, you can keep hauling the cheap broker frieght and continue whining about how you want our country to turn into a socialist economy.

I happen to LOVE capitalism and our free market economy. I also happen to love when the economy turns south and forces incompetent trucking companies out of business. It just means more money in my pocket and higher rates when the dust settles, at least for a little while until other incompetent people decide they can make money running trucks and drive rates back down again.

 

if you don't figure out how to not let those brokers take advantage of you then it's you driving our rates down. I'm glad you have the whole industry figured out in your two month exp. Guess we've just been spinning our wheels for the last 20 years.

 

Why not do what most folks do and negotiate in a fuel surcharge, and handle the cost of fuel that way. Most companies and owners that do so are paying about 1.25 per gallon for their fuel, with all the rest of the cost compensated for by the fuel surcharge.

Maybe we need to redefine the term Free Economy, since if the economy is free, then it doesn't need regulation.

 

I love paying $3.50 per gallon for fuel and I honestly wish it would go to $10.00 a gallon. The higher fuel goes, the more money I make. The fuel surcharge that I have negotiated with MY customers is based on 6.0 mpg. Since my fleetwide average mpg is well over 7 mpg, I make profit on the margin.

And no, the free market system does not need to be regulated. It works perfectly. Supply and demand and other simple economic theories do a great job of weeding out the inefficient businesses and the incompetent business owners.

You know what...If you REALLY want socialism, then why don't you move to a communist country?

 

Yeah, a lot of these folks don't realize that the higher priced the fuel is, the better off the fuel surcharge makes it. Ours at a lot of our customers is based on a percentage, and if you figure it at a typical 17%, that works out to well over 60 cents per mile based on our rates. Some of the customers pay a higher percentage, some pay a set number on a per mile basis. I saw one load a few months back, the load ran 121 miles and the FSC was a straight 125.00. We typically get around 6 mpg since our trailers pull hard, but on that particular load the truck used about 21 gallons of fuel at about 2.50 per gallon at the time. So the truck used less that 53 dollars worth of fuel and recovered 125 on the fuel surcharge alone.

This isn;t something new, it;'s something that a lot of these folks should have been doing years ago, and now they want to government to make up for the fact that they fell behind in the race.

 

No need to go that far. There are several candidates running in the current election that would be more than happy to bring socialism right to yor doorstep. LOL!!