What Is Considered Cheap Freight ?

Defining Cheap Freight-- add up all your home bills, truck overhead and projected maintenance, projected retirement savings, health insurance, life insurance, vacation and truck replacement costs, quantify it by the annum, then divide that number by your total projected miles to come up with a "Life" number. (Let's say $1 per mile) Take the total projected miles and divide by your projected miles per gallon times projected price per gallon and divide by yearly number again (Let's says $0.55 per mile) and add that to the "Life" number for your "break even point"

 

Why is cost per mile important? what is is important is cost per day, which includes the cost per mile. Even when the truck is parked, it is still an expense every day. And so am I.

I was not going out of my way to load or unload... I traveled between those two locations with or without the load. So why not take the expense reducing load to get to my next load? I did not bid a lower price. That is what that load paid, as it was not an important load, just pallets of plastic produce crates.

Did I make a profit off that individual load? As I have stated before, NO... It did add $14,000 to the overall profit for the year though, and that is nothing to sneeze at for 9 hours of work for 40 days.

See I don't get hung up on cost per mile, revenue per mile, as that is not what made me profitable. That load was available, and it reduced my expenses for that day...So I made the choice to reduce my expense for the day by $350.

If you would rather spend that $350 out of your pocket, so you can say you do not haul cheap freight, that is your choice.

 

You are responsible for your own suffering... I can not cause you to suffer by taking a load that increased my year end profit. The attitude that life is fair and I owe you anything is so wrong.

It is NOT my problem if your expenses are higher than mine. It is not my concern what you think a load should pay. It is called competition, and If I want to move a load for $350 to reduce my expenses that is my choice, NOT yours. Did it embolden the broker, I don't care. For that area, there were 3 trucks for every load, so competition was keeping the price down, not a bold broker. Supply and demand... which is a lost concept on so many truckers.

Competition sets price, in a free market.

 

Answer:
That works, as long as someone else doesn't take your $3/pm load for $1/pm to get where they are going.

Try specialized with slow freight; everybody charging "backhaul" rates to re-position & pretty soon there isn't anything that pays.

 

While I'm all for true capitalism and free markets. I'm just glad there it's still plenty of good paying freight I don't even have to consider pulling that cheap. I'm more than happy to leave that stuff sitting on the docks for those that include cheap freight add part of their business plan.

 

Ewwwbrokerload by Flipflops posted Jan 11, 2016 at 5:02 PM

THIS IS CHEAP FREIGHT. How can this qualify for back haul to anyone? Hazmat? Not a Partial? Heavy? $1.18/mile WITHOUT any DEADHEAD.

We can sit here and talk bout back hauls, light loads, partials, dry, make any excuse for a low price for someone to take a load and it not being cheap. But this? Heavy/FULL? Hazmat? Not coming out of a dead area? This is actually insulting.

 

Some people consider this to be the perfect filler load to get to their "main load". But if that "main load" cancels then do you feel good about yourself for the filler load you took?? lol

 

How can that be a filler load? That's an outbound IL load. Hazmat. I could understand if there were only 10 loads coming out, and some guy wants to drive for a back haul. But there are way better paying dry,lighter loads that way. You can get $1200 of some dry freight going there with your eyes closed. But heavy hazmat?
Who would take this load?

 

Read previous post and you'll see who'd justify taking this

 

I think a posted rate like that on a heavy haz-mat load that close to Chicago area is wishful thinking. Obviously they have time to shop it on price. There are certainly plenty of better options around Chicago even in slow times. I get taking a low rate to get back to the good stuff but only a complete brain dead person would even consider this load as such. Talk about laziness.