who makes the most money within the supply chain in this industry?

In risk adjusted terms it's definitely the various middle men taking slices off for connecting one party with another. In terms of total sales it's the ship, followed by the trucks, followed by the port, followed by the warehouse. The port might have the best gross profit margin since they are basically a giant extortion scheme.

EDIT: I should be really clear here... These aren't the kinds of middle men who are pure rent seekers holding up the process. They're in a very competitive business where their expertise is legitimately needed. /promiddlemenrantbymiddleman

Any horror story loads?

Do you offer LTL gaurenteed delivery days? If so, is shipper/receiver required to pay additional?

Are holidays a pain in the ass?

What is standard markup the brokerage firm takes?

What is considered a good week for you personally? In total billed amount or mark up?

How are the port issues currently effecting business?

What would be the rock-bottom price for RORO service from USA to Europe?

I have no idea lol. That's not really something I've ever dealt with. We almost entirely do domestic+canada where I work.

It caused a lot of chaos this year for sure. One of my customers was moving a bunch of truckloads of slinkies from Long Beach to Detroit and port issues caused a bunch of those loads to get cancelled.

Is it cheaper to go from Asia to California and then overland by truck/ train to the east coast or to go from Asia directly to east coast by ship? Assuming fcl.

One of the wholesalers i buy from does not have its own trucking. Every delivery I get comes from a trucking company with whom my only contact with was a thirty second phone call before the first order where they told me the price. No contract or anything and they always try to get me to pay in cash. $200/pallet in a freezer truck for a 1100 mile trip. since then I havd done like 15 pallet with no problems.

Is this standard? A good price? Should I be worried about insurance or a screw up on their part?

Trucking seems like a shady industry.

why isn't there (or is there?) an eBay for this?

Ship to the West coast and then truck east. That COULD change if the chinese build another canal or if Long Beach get's even slightly ****tier. Long Beach needs to drastically improve service levels or importers will start looking hard at other options.

'Pay me in cash up front' tells me that there is zero chance they ever compensate you if there's a screw up.

Reefer LTL (what you're doing) is a strange business honestly. Because of the extra dimension (temperature, cargo incompatibility) added to the usual formulations for LTL (dimensions, density) the larger Reefer LTL carriers have decided to take themselves straight to retail. They reject the (complex) price calculations of the dry LTL carriers and offer very similar rates to all comers. As a result freight brokerages aren't much of a value when dealing with Reefer LTL.

Because of what's in the last post I rarely deal with Reefer LTL. I will note that refrigerated LTL rates are such that if the shipment takes up >25% of the trucks available capacity it's cheaper to just do it TL with a light load. My turkey customers routinely get an entire truck to move loads as light as 6000 lbs (out of a 42-44,000 lb capacity) although that could also be because of product incompatibility. (There are a lot of USDA regs about what can travel on the same truck as meat)

I know that I talk to a specific Reefer LTL carrier a lot (I generally call them first when I have freight coming back from Florida or South Georgia to Chicago) they told me that they were charging ~1.2k for 5 pallets weighing ~5,000 lbs on the way down.

Cliffs: The price is good, you're taking additional risk for that price break, it might be worth it depending on the risk/reward. Definitely do not ship seafood like this.

EDIT: Or berries/any other sensitive produce, or meat valued >1.50/lb, or anything that could be resold super easily. And to answer your question about the business being shady... Yes? It's a highly illiquid market that is VERY fragmented and contains a wide variety of different actors. It's shady factor definitely changes as you move around the country as well. Some areas (like the entire ****ing west coast) are crawling with the scummiest people you'll ever do business with.

That's basically all I stare at all day. DAT and Internet Truckstop are basically always active on my work computer.

Remember that there are about 15 variables on every load, and those variables change depending on the product. Making new relationships has a transaction cost (competent employees time) that is seriously not negligible.

Thanks for this thread. I'm not involved in shipping whatsoever, but this is extremely interesting and this sort of learning is why I read BFI.

My company has 7 locations. We transfer from our main hub in Nashville to these 6 locations each night, typically with full trailer loads of product. The drivers turn around and come back to Nashville with fairly empty trucks.

How best do we work with a broker to look at back haul opportunities for delivery within our service area?

I may have already asked this but missed the answer.

You set up a load for me a few times and I notice the same carrier backing into the dock. I start to book directly through the carrier. Will you find out about this and how do you react? Stop dealing with shipper? Start marking up your quotes more with shipper? Stop using carrier? Give carrier less loads? No reaction, this is standard?

In this situation you want to stay flexible and use whichever broker has the lane you need. For your front haul you guys have the ideal situation for running your own trucks or setting up contracts with asset based guys at relatively low year round rates.

With a few exceptions (we have some dedicated lanes for larger customers... in fact scoring a dedicated lane is every brokers dream because ideally he could find a carrier that could ALWAYS do it, this is as close to a residual as a freight broker will ever get.) most lanes brokers have aren't lanes like yours that go every night from your facility to the same place.

You need DAT or Internet Truckstop... Eventually you'll build some relationships with specific brokers for specific lanes where they call you and tell you a few days in advance when they're getting a specific lane. I have a few carriers on a few lanes that I get repeatedly (Jasper IN-> Laredo TX I run 3-4x a week on average... But there are some weeks where I run 0 and some weeks where I run 10x) where I literally call them as soon as I have an inkling I might even get that lane.

1) the carrier probably won't go along with that... Because if I find out I can legitimately sue him for 30% of his gross sales with you directly. (It's in the contract he signed with me) Whether my management decides that this is the right option to go with is debatable: but the carrier getting blacklisted by my company is not. We have a lot more freight than just your lane, and if I'm using the same carrier on your lanes I'm probably using him a lot of other places.

2) I probably won't do business with you again... Which sucks because decent freight brokers actually are hard to come by.

This definitely happens, but it's never happened to me. It's important to recognize that my main customer I'll do 500+ loads with this year. I'll use probably at least 200 different carriers to cover those loads... So ruining that relationship is something that my customer cares about about as much as I do.

In my mind a customer that does something like this is telling me something very important: that they don't give a **** about working with me and see their relationship with my industry in very adversarial terms. I don't have time to deal with that **** at all so I'd be borderline grateful to find out about it early on.

EDIT: I'll probably find out because the carrier will probably tell me. I may never find out, but if this is a standard practice for you I'll eventually find out. I rarely use the same carrier so often that it would start to make sense for a customer to 'cut out the middle man'.

Thanks for the thorough responses.

Do you work with entire US or specific to a region?nismit common for brokers to cover entire US or do they mainly have a certain region they cover?

In this business information is everything. Typically a brokerage has a lot of information about stuff they actually do, and very little about stuff they do not.

Information is so important that I can fairly easily subdivide it into types:

1) Carrier information. Which carriers are good and which are bad? What lanes do they like to run? Are they always in a certain place every week looking to go somewhere?

2) Price information. What is the market rate from a to b? How deep is the market for a to b at that market price?

3) Operational information. What idiosyncrasies are there about this type of freight? This can range from relatively simple (watermelons) to incredibly complicated (overdimensional and overweight loads that have about 50 moving parts).

Information determines whether or not a brokerage can execute something well. If they charge too much they'll never get a chance to do the lane, if they charge to little they'll be out of business if they keep doing it...

One of the big upsides to working at a bigger shop is that you have access to information. You have more carriers in your database, you have more price data about lanes from a to b (because your coworkers have done it), and there are lots of people you can ask about the operational stuff. I'm not particularly limited by Geography where I work (except Canada. Our info about Canada is limited so we don't do it as much) because we run 10k+ loads per year... And those loads go a lot of places, which means that I have a reasonably good idea of what things should cost going from anywhere in the us to somewhere else.

My big limitations are risk (loads that are likely to result in a claim+ expensive) and the need to make enough money to justify the time commitment.

You just stated the most important concept in business.

Couple LTL questions-

My company uses an outside company to arrange most of the outbound freight and they use three carriers about 98% of the time and one of maybe seven other LTL carriers the other 2%. When I ask them why they don't "spread the love" more they say that some of our other locations have told them not to use certain carriers, but I think they either get kickbacks from certain carriers or use carriers they like for some unknown reason

They are likely not using the cheapest carrier on many occasions, and I would like to be able to check this. I know they use a website or software program that gives them rates for a bunch of carriers. Would that be available to me and would it be free? Any idea what they use?

Secondly, regarding freight claims. I have been newly assigned to handle these and it seems the carriers are often scumbags. Ex- twice they have destroyed a case we shipped out fully crated (they ran a forklift into one case, and set some heavy item on top of the other one) and once they offered 25% as reimbursement and once they denied the claim because when the case came back to us with the crate smashed and falling off we took pictures as is, then removed the crating to see how badly damaged the case was and took pictures of the damaged case. They denied the claim because "when we came an inspected the case, the original crating was not available for inspection" even though we had sent them pictures before we removed the crating. Seems like a chicken sh** attempt to avoid reimbursing us for the destruction their employees caused. Agree?

The best method of keeping LTL carriers honest is to have a few and get them all to quote you regularly. More likely than not it'll STILL be the same 3 companies trucks pulling up, but at least you'll know you aren't grossly overpaying. PM me if you would like a fairly competitive LTL quote to compare against your current provider (/self promotion I couldn't help it)

LTL Carriers are large companies that exist in an insanely competitive environment that is all about cost. Most of them have pretty terrible service and are miserable to deal with. In this way they greatly remind me of airlines.

EDIT: I should let you know right now that service levels can vary wildly from one location to another with different carriers. This means that it's important to try out all of the LTL carriers and develop your own preferences. It's ok to ask your LTL provider to give you a list of LTL carriers with their rates and time frames and then select who you want to use.

Hey man. I am in college now, and I want this ^ too. I am a dual major in Economics & Supply Chain and I definitely like my SC degree more. I think the type of work is good for my skill set (problem-solving, logical analysis, risk management, avoiding crises, handling crises) though these things tend to lend themselves to a 9-5, pre-set salary job. I worked in Logistics Finance for a large foods distributor for a 6-month coop and while I did really well in my position I found the lifestyle (same hours, same paycheck, many relatively similar/repetitive analyses) kind of boring. How were you able to find something that rewards you for hard/good work and has some variability/unpredictability in pay?