The Source for Trucking News, Opinions and Trucking Jobs | Economics of Trucking in Florida

In a word - Sucks.  Most times it’s bad, sometimes it’s worse. The trade show we (and 25 other teams) haul from San Diego to Orlando finished on Wednesday. On Friday we have a load that reschedules and now we have nothing on a Friday afternoon, in Florida. Cindy was scouring the load board we have access to and after calling about several loads, it was a definite lesson learned. Don’t come to Florida without a way out or enough money to leave empty and go somewhere else. We had enough money to leave Orlando, but we went south to Miami for this canceled load and I wasn’t thrilled about dead-heading 700 miles to Atlanta.

I’ve always known this, but hearing brokers offer a dollar a mile for a pad-wrap team load cross country and their excuse? "It’s Florida". Actually, it was Miami, which is worse than just Florida. Our company usually has something or puts together a bunch of less-than-truckloads and we make our way north or west. We had a chance to have half a trailer, but I didn’t feel good about what the unloading process was going to be for a couple of crates of car bodies,  so we sit. Now the load that canceled on us is now rescheduled for Monday (maybe).

In a (my) hurried decision late on Saturday afternoon we take a load that was offered from Miami to Atlanta. An overnighter, we would be unloaded Sunday and be closer to more reasonable freight. I left what I thought was a possibility on Monday or Tuesday and took the sure thing to Atlanta. It didn’t pay much for the mileage, but for 12 hours of work, it was okay.

Cindy is getting good at checking the load board, she was watching a team load from El Paso, TX to Miami. It went from $5000 to saying "BIG, BIG MONEY".  It didn’t do us any good, but it was fun to watch!

We’ve come to the conclusion that successful trucking is -

• Who you know.
• Who knows you.
• Being in the right place at the right time.

I’ve known about the first two for a long time. The third one is starting to sink in. I’m still working on how to put that to our advantage instead of the brokers!

It seems people still call each other with freight before it goes on the load boards. I’m noticing a difference when we are posted as available, we will get a ton of calls for freight that isn’t listed yet. And this time when we were posted with a bunch of other trucks, nothing.  We continue to learn new things about trucking and the things I forget, I get reminded about!