Will this help or push rates into the crapper?

Let the bottom feeders keep racing to the bottom. My income is slowly but steadily increasing. My value as an experienced driver bumps up ever higher as more and more fail out of the industry.

Experience, a clean record, and a solid, dependable reputation has allowed me to weather every storm thus far, and will continue to do so into the foreseeable future.

 

Unfortunately saying things won’t affect you is a little misguided, unless you are ow/os or other specialized service you will be affected soon. The tidal wave will reach the shore sooner then later.

 

I've survived worse bumps than this. There are plenty who will fall. Entire fleets. But freight stills needs to be moved, and quality, experienced drivers are still needed to move that freight.

Cheap drivers are only good for cheap freight. When the chips are down, and reliability counts, it's the proven drivers who get the call.

 

Will probably push rates up initially as they take losses to gain market share. Once they have enough market share they will drop prices down to break even levels and crush the industry. For that reason I will never work with any digital brokerages.

 

That’s an interesting point. I think one thing that will accelerate all size fleets rate of going out of business is that driver wage increases were massive during this last boom time. Will companies begin to try to claw that back? I don’t think so and if they do they will lose their drivers. If they don’t they can’t survive. Without drivers they can’t survive either. A fleet that has a lot of trucks sitting with no drivers is the last thing you want in a bad time especially.

Edit: That’s where you have to stay on above average freight to be one of the companies that can maintain or still pay more. If not you’ll be at a hide risk of failure.

 

I could see an initial increase if they (convoy, Uber, etc) really do start taking significant amounts of freight from megas. The time between when they get a massive influx of freight in their network to when the masses discover this is the new way to make money in trucking. Is when the rates will be high on their apps. After that is when it’ll go down down down.

Wonder if megas could go under due to their costs being so high? If they go from 80% contract freight to 20%. What happens then?

 

It's the same what every other mega brokerage does, push down rates as low as they can. No difference

 

They're limited by their manpower though. TQL is the king of exploiting cheap labor from college graduates making phone calls all day long begging you to work for free and I always get fantastic rates from them.

If they're able to pit software and AI against us though we won't stand a chance.

 

Has sense. AL and the data from ELD