Landstar is getting cheap.

They never were your problem.

 

In the first week of the 2015 produce season Landstar called me up and took a load for some number I don't remember. At the time I didn't really understand Landstar and how it works. Anyway at 3:30PM they called me up to tell me that their truck had broken down and wouldn't be able to make it. At this time in the afternoon the rate I had with Landstar was going, going, gone. I get the load back up and get to work. Landstar calls me 5 minutes and offers to take the load for 800 dollars more than they had previously booked.

Of course now I understand what happened. They liked my load enough in the morning to double broker it. When it became obvious that the market was headed sharply north they decided it wasn't worth the trouble... and then they forgot about it for a few hours... and then they finally got around to telling me after every non-scalper truck had been purchased hours before.

Then a Landstar scalper saw it and wanted it lol. I refused to do business with them again and paid a grand more than I'd covered it with Landstar originally. The customer thankfully ate 300 of that... But I went from making 300 to losing four hundred bucks.... And a metric ton of stress and multiple hours of work.

I've stood by that commitment to not do business again ever since. Honestly they are major competitors of mine on almost all of my accounts so I can't even say that I wouldn't do business with them if I was in charge of a shipper. But they are insanely shady as a carrier if you're a broker.

 

Read my post dude. This kind of thing is a HUGE problem for a broker. Nobody is doing this on purpose. And if they are a shady brokerage you don't mind cutting off you can seriously extract a solid WEEK of extra revenue out of someone when they do this.

EDIT: Particularly with Reefer. The fact that freight is perishing means that the carrier basically has a gun to your head. Of course the carrier has to worry about a claim in those situations, but considering how much damage they are threatening the shipper with they just have an astronomical amount of leverage.

To every shipper in the world... Do not do this! In this particular case it probably would have been smarter to ship it the way the BOL says. Once the load has been shipped it is going where you told it to go. Unless the truck is controlled by the guy you are talking to and he is actively open to it just let it go. Trying to force people to do things because they have your freight on their truck isn't you being clever. It's like getting chemo to shave your head. Just pay what it costs to get a truck that's willing to go where you want the #### load to go.

 

See this is all false statements. Landstar called him. The GM from Landstar called him? Or one agent did? These are huge generalizations, and I hope one of the grown ups from LS puts it to you for that.

 

That's no good, man. Like @boredsocial said, this happens so infrequently in my operations as to be notable. In the one instance this year, the customer had just hired a new shipping clerk, and she sent me over the wrong information. Her boss, who I'd been dealing with previously, calls me on my cell phone and explained what happened. I called the driver, who is an O/O I deal with pretty regularly, and explain the situation. He tells me what he wants, to square it up. I relay that to the customer, who agrees it's their screw up. They eat the new price, and all is good. Well, except for that shipping clerk. She didn't stick around much longer.

 

Let me ask you hypothetically. This turned out well with no skin off of your nose. The contract is between you & O/O. So if the customer is telling you "suck it", then what do you do? Would you make it right out of your own pocket? OR would you ask the O/O to make it right out of his pocket? Meet in the middle?

The OP agreed to another rate for the trouble.

You just stated a scenario where you had nothing to do with it, wasn't my fault. The SB broker without knowing wtf happened, makes the wild claims it was all done purposely, as does the OP, again without being there knowing what actually happened.

So what would you do?

 

Lol that magical moment when you realize that this new shipping person isn't long for the world and that the wheels under the bus are for them.

 

I heard a story from an old school produce hauler about drivers these days panicking if they had to do things the way it was common for him to operate. A seller would load his truck on the west coast and send him off to Chicago. Only to change the destination to say NYC in the middle of the trip. The destination might actually change more than once during the trip. This was long before cell phones and emails. The trucks were paid well to do it but drivers had to be flexible and ready for that kind of thing to happen it wasn't a big deal.