We have hit the floor with rates

Good luck with that.
The LTL's are laying people off.
But, ride it till it won't ride no mo.....

 

There were loads going to Southern Kali for $1 a mile. But I won't do that just on sheer PRINCIPLE. The brokers can shove those loads right up their poop shoot.

 

#BringBackScooter

 

Perhaps you don't understand the spot market. The more people that LTL companies lay off the busier he'll be. That's the way this works.

 

You’re confusing the LTL freight companies with multi-stop loads that he is doing.

 

I live in Phoenix, that’s why said this
But honestly end of the week is sucks anyway and everywhere

 

I go to Phoenix quite a bit. We have a multi drop run that finishes out there. For the longest time I had no issues getting out and back toward home. I would get empty on Tuesday afternoon and always had a load for Wed morning or Thurs morning if I wanted a reset. My last trip a couple weeks ago she couldn’t find anything that paid decent, so she checked for something going toward Denver because we had a customer load ready to pick up, and couldn’t even get something decent going up there. They ended up paying me to bounce to Denver to cover our customer load. And I haven’t been back to Phoenix since.

 

Hence my nope and mcdonalds comments lol. Bout the only 2 situations i take cheap freight are A as a requirment for a much better paying load. (I have run into situations where to get material B they needed material A and didnt have enough of A to cover their normal B loads + my own load this i was making my own load) Or B i am picking up a high paying load the same place as the dropoff and the first pickup is between where i am and where i am going as a favor to keep a very well paying customer happy. A customer who wants me to move a load at cost+ a bit then give me a $5 or $6 load at the same place that cheap load is going is fine in my eyes as the average is still in the $4+ range.

 

Customers are focusing hard on renegotiating that outbound Phoenix right now. That’s been my experience anyway. Sucks because rates were high enough you could bounce from so cal to that area to come back to the Midwest if you had to. The little tricks are slowly evaporating to strategically move your truck.

 

You don’t need to be loaded all the time
Guys in Florida grab cheap going to Wisconsin but many times there are loads in Chicago that would net them the same and just deadhead out

For instance
I grabbed a FT load going from the east coast to the west coast and it was $3 PM ttt
I had half a deck open and I deadhead 900 miles out of my way to grab two pallets, 9’ and 600lbs
But this brought all miles. Those 900 and the miles to delivery up an additional $0.30 pm

I would have landed on Friday had I not taken this partial and most likely not gotten reloaded so now I drove an extra day and out $2700 more on the truck and didn’t sit as the partial was 1/2 block off the interstate on my way to the main drop and both kicked off on Monday and I still got a restart in

Side note
The per day math mentioned can work but if you grab something that takes your per day from $1000 to $1500 but you spent $600 more in time, days, or fuel then that doesn’t work

 

I haven't dared taken my flatbed out west in many months, especially Phoenix.
You'd be lucky just to catch $2 a mile going back east and if you do it's probably to Florida or Massachusetts

 

They’re building a bunch of warehouses on the west side of town and it sounds like freight will be coming there from the port in CA. Hopefully that will help the outbound loads but who knows how long until everything is done.

We had some pretty cake loads out of there that paid well going to random places but they were close to where we needed to be. Now people are taking those for cheap and ending up empty in the middle of nowhere.