Just For Laughs

Questions from a lifelong company driver:

Brokers must add some value to process or they wouldn’t be used. Is it just wrangling paperwork?

I’ve always thought OOIDA was a pretty useless, contemptible organization thats only purpose was to sell garbage to its members. Why doesn’t OOIDA form a low cost brokerage where the savings are passed on to the drivers? They already have name recognition and they would actually be useful in pushing out brokers adversarial to driver’s interests.

 

The guy in the video accepted the lower price for the load.
Also complained about filling out paperwork and that he refused to do that anymore.
I guess the guy that decided to fill out the paperwork got paid the $500.

I use brokers all the time running off the load board. I agree filling out bids for all the shippers is something I won't do. So you won't hear me complain about the broker making his pay.

If I'm not happy about the pay, I agree on, you won't see me make a video on the internet complaining.

Sure I'd like to get all the pay. But, that requires me to do all paperwork.

My specialty is driving. I'll continue to spend most of my effort doing what I do well and keep using brokers to keep me moving.
I do need brokers.

 

Yup.

I wasted 7 minutes, and then read the comments - only to find another 20 fools.

Sure - take your 10 truck fleet and pitch it to a shipper needing 1,000 trucks and 3,000 trailers.

Or try to rally 100,000 independent operators that will never agree on the color of a blue sky.

 

Things like "Trucker's Union" and "OOIDA forms a low cost brokerage" and complaining about paperwork are no small part of why I have a job. This is a very fractious industry with a significant chunk of smaller players, who are like herding cats, at best. Getting truckers to agree on much of anything is again, like herding cats, at best.

I'm reminded of all of the so-called trucker strikes and rallies and marches and convoys over the past few years. Bunch of smoke online, forty thousand people in facebook groups yammering away, and then three dudes show out.

To answer that actual question, @Deadwood and (if I come off/came off a little adversarial, it's because I can't remember how many times I've answered this question over the past seven years here) what brokerages provide for shippers is multi-faceted. We basically function as a replacement for the booking and management people that a shipper might otherwise need to employ, allowing them to streamline their traffic operations significantly, while also providing them with extended credit solutions. We pay carriers *before* we get paid. Often times, weeks before we get paid.

What we provide carriers is a free sales department where you can even choose to say no to what we are offering. Because I have a relationship with a customer with X freight on Y lane, I am able to offer it to you, the hypothetical one-man band owner-operator or ten truck fleet (with only one of your trucks on that lane, once a month, thanks for the example @blairandgretchen) a slice of the pie.

I hope this helps.

 

They could still be profit driven, it would just be a WalMart style “Always the lowest price” model of cost plus 10-20% profit margin. Whatever it is, drivers would pay it if they thought they weren’t getting screwed. The benefit to OOIDA is that they would *actually* be doing something that would help drivers - the people they are supposedly in business to support.

 

You say brokers save shippers from having to deal with a fractured market but brokers are equally fractured. If OOIDA were to make a move they could get financing and be an Instant market mover. Will they? Of course not. They don’t genuinely give a #### about drivers or they would have done something like this already.

The point is this: It could be done.

 

I never said we weren't a fractious market segment. That's immaterial to the discussion. You asked why shippers use brokers, and why the OOIDA doesn't open up a brokerage of its own. The latter could be done. It'd be an egregiously horrible idea for a dues-receiving organization that is supposed to be a voice of one market segment to then get into business utilizing that member base, for a whole host of reasons. You are now effectively taking advantage of those members to do business. What do you do when you have disputes with members? Who says who gets what loads when there's effectively a 'tie'? And now, as a broker, whose interests are they representing? It's a huge entanglement of interests that is just a bad idea from the jump. There's more ways for it to go horribly bad than there are for it to go right.

Now going back to why shippers and carriers use brokers. Again, broadly: we exist in this market to make their lives easier in some capacity, as well as make carriers' lives easier in another capacity. That's our value added. Some brokers specialize in certain market segments, some don't. Some have cheap ### pricing, some provide good service, but may cost a little more. There's nuance in different strategies and approaches, and the customers using brokers evaluate their needs based on how the broker handles their service. It's also important that not everyone paying the freight bill is interested in using brokers. And that's just fine, too. There's a thousand ways to slice the pie, and several someones are doing each of those. It's a highly competitive market, as is the trucking side of things.