Supply chain

[firefighter ontheside]

I'm willing to chip in a dollar to get it off the ground.

[SawyerTed]

I imagine a chicken ship would produce almost as much guano as we can come up with sometimes!   :D
 
As for sleeping well and crazy ideas, I exceed my daily quota of crazy ideas nearly every day, I just hit the quota mark by mid morning. :D  The nights where my mind worked overtime have mostly faded into the past.  I don't like letting people or things live in my head rent free.  Seems like now days I have more trouble not saying what I'm thinking. 

Please, don't give me any credit for deep thinking.  Usually I'm just wading around in my own mess.

Back to the supply chain issues.  I had a conversation with a manufacturer's rep last week who told me that they were having a terrible time shipping machinery to customers.  They had to try three different companies to even get a truck driver to show up with a suitable truck.  The first two were no shows.  That delayed the shipment of their machines about two weeks.

In a separate conversation with a manager of trucking for a major poultry producer in the country, I learned the following.  It seems a significant number of pre-Covid truckers decided to retire during the closure last year.  The average age of CDL drivers is pretty high and there haven't been enough young people entering the business.  So a wave of retirements hit the industry hard.  Those young people who want to drive are taking jobs with delivery companies that do not use larger trucks.  Amazon delivery drivers and Fed-ex delivery drivers are examples of younger people driving for a living but not entering the CDL ranks.

[mike_belben]

May 2020 is when rates got down into 99 cent a mile territory and many many keys got hung up.  


Its about $1.50/mile to run a 48 state general freight truck @ $3/gallon. I was running like an idiot, gone for a week solid to make mcdonalds money and redbulling myself into illness for it.  Why bother?

If the world wants this crap so bad let their wallets show it. 

[BradMarks]

Our best 48' (curtain van) right now is $1.75/mile plus fuel. Comes to about $2.50 total. This for less than 1000 miles. Have paid over $3.00 this past summer for long haul. Our loads go to out of the way locations. 

[mike_belben]

The best time to truck is during high fuel. Sounds silly bit its 100% repeatable.  The credit crunched operators go broke at the pumps and leave the market- reducing truck supply very fast, while at the same time the shippers accept they have to pay fuel surcharge or trucks wont come for their loads.  Rising linehaul rate has ti be shared with the hired drivers in many pay formats so just paying more per mile isnt enough.  The trucking company will insist they get the increase in a fuel surcharge that is not shared with the driver. If you want pay FSC when others do you wont get trucks. 

At $2/gallon no one will pay a fuel surcharge so the carrier is putting $300-500 a day in the truck out of pocket.  At $4.00/gallon he is collecting maybe $800 a day in FSC AND getting a higher dollar per mile rate due to the load/truck ratio going in the trucks favor.  High fuel generates a ton of economic activity that increases loads needing decks.  

[mike_belben]

You see this oil chart?  WTI oil has to compete with brent.  Russia has thinly veiled control of OPEC and came up with a plausibly deniable assault on the west via overproducing oil at the same time they and their partner china were playing tarriff games with trump.










I lasted about 8 more weeks of $400-550 paychecks (before tax!) on 6 to 7 day weeks away with unlimited work hours. This clandestine attack on oil and import/export immediately cost many people their livelihood in america. The texas/OK oilfield shut right off and a huge amount of those trucks and drivers dove into general freight driving the whole thing down.

Trump promised a border wall at the same time he was issuing worker visas for mexican truck drivers to help with fake shortages when we already had too many trucks on the road as reflected in the rates.  Suspending the hours of service doesnt help when guys are already running more hours than they can stay awake or are waiting 2 days to get loaded with water, sanitizer and TP.  Mile long lines were normal.  Imagine spending a day of being parked in a truck in a street with no portapotty and no idle laws, and no pay because you havent moved an inch and are paid on the mile.


The blacks and whites lost a lot of trucks.  I saw the repo man pretty often at pilot.  The texas based mexicans and chicago/NJ based slavs and indians/pakistani are somehow able to run for years at losing rates without going under.

Covert foreign subsidy is a reasonable conclusion based on a whole lot of subversive history.