Skip to main content

Less than Load: a thought about trucking and freight

 


The company Yellow, a freight-moving trucking concern that has been around for nearly a century, is now in bankruptcy. 

Why? As usual, there are a lot of reasons: The intransigence of the Teamsters, a series of bad judgments by the managers, and a private equity firm's desire to fish in troubled waters all enter the picture.

But what I want to talk about today is the nature of the business that Yellow is in.  (It has no connection, by the way, with Yellow Cabs. Yellow is simply a distinctive and easily distinguishable color on the move, so it was a natural choice for two distinct sets of company founders.) 

Yellow is in the LTL business. This means that it contracts to move freight that constitutes less than a full truckload -- less than enough material to fill up one of those ubiquitous trailers one sees on the road. 

Though there are other firms that work for shippers willing to fill several full truckloads at once, the segment of LTL freight is a critical part of the supply chain for US industry. After all, loads with anything less than a trailer's worth of goods threaten dead loss. The use of gasoline to move a half-filled trailer is a waste of gas. 

Fortunately, part loads can be jigsawed together into a full load in the manner you see in the image above.

Unfortunately, the jigsawing-together is not a mysterious or proprietary art, so the LTL industry is hotly competitive. Indeed, this gets us back to the "management missteps" point above. Yellow is bankrupt today in part because early in this millennium it tried to consolidate the LTL space, buying enough other LTL firms to lessen the competitive pressure. 

This left it with a heavy debt load, which became more than just an annoyance in the global financial crisis of 2008.

But I will end here. 


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere.  At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak...
24 comments
Read more

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.   We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...
10 comments
Read more

The Growing Block Theory of Time

My own disposition, in regard to the philosophy of time, is toward the "growing block" theory. This is the view that past events remain realities, that present-moment events are also realities, but that future events are not yet real. The image is of the universe as a block with an edge on (say) the right-hand side. The block is expanding because that edge is moving ever further right, and that edge is what we call the present, or, simply, "now." Everything to the left of that edge is both static (the past is complete) and, still and forever, real. Think of the phrase "the moving finger writes." The chief alternatives to the growing-block theory are "presentism" (only the now-edge itself is real) and "eternalism" (past, present, and future are all real." I believe that time is a growing block because (1) that's what it feels like, (2) we should stick with the introspective phenomenon unless we have good reason to abandon ...
8 comments
Read more