Imagine a driver pulling up to your dock. Clean uniform, a bill of lading with the right PO number, a friendly “how’s it going.” Your team loads twelve pallets and waves him off. Three days later the receiver calls asking where the freight is. You dial the carrier listed on the paperwork and the number goes […]
Picture two invoices for the same pallet moving the same lane. Same weight, same freight class, same pickup address. One is from last October and one is from this week, and the second one is far higher. Nobody changed the shipment. Two things moved underneath it, and most shippers only notice […]
Every year around this time, the same call lands on a freight desk somewhere. A shipper who looked at rates in August, decided to wait, and now needs pallets moved before Black Friday. The number on the screen isn’t the one they remember. It’s higher, the carrier list is shorter, and the pickup […]
Labor Day just passed, and if you run shipping for a small or mid-size business, that weekend was your starting gun. Not because anything dramatic happened on the roads this week, but because every carrier’s pricing calendar just flipped into peak mode. FedEx and UPS have locked in demand surcharges […]
If your dock has a lane running somewhere between 550 and 1,500 miles, the math on that lane has quietly changed this year. Truckload spot rates were sitting close to 29 percent above last year’s levels through most of July, and intermodal has not moved anywhere near that fast. On the exact […]
Spot rates have dropped close to 17 percent since their July 4th peak. If you priced a lane this week and it came back cheaper than it did a month ago, that number is real, and it is also the least useful piece of information you will get all quarter. The trucks that would need to come back for this to be a […]
If you have shipped freight in the last ten years, you have heard about the driver shortage. The usual version goes like this: not enough people want to drive, so trucks sit idle and your rates creep up. This year the story changed. In 2026, trucks are leaving the road because of new federal rules, not […]
It’s early August, and the Atlantic hurricane season peaks around September 10, roughly five weeks out. That gap is the most valuable thing sitting on your shipping calendar right now, and most shippers spend it doing nothing. The Gulf has already put two named storms on […]
Most people picture back-to-school as a July trip to the store for notebooks and sneakers. For anyone moving freight, it looks more like a wave that builds all summer and crests right when trucks are hardest to find. The numbers this year are hard to ignore. The National Retail Federation […]
You quoted a lane on a Monday. By Thursday, that rate was gone, and not because someone booked it first. The carrier just didn’t have a truck to put on it anymore. If that’s happened to you in the last few weeks, you’re not imagining it, and it’s not going to fix itself in August the way it usually does. […]