As of recent, the latest findings for the final quarter of 2022 have come in from a public survey of small fleets and owner-operators regarding business conditions. With the decline of such conditions, there’s plenty of new areas where concern grows for trucking. Experts in the field believe that spot rates aren’t in-line with higher costs that can face carriers, while weighing heavy on owner-operators’ profits. Luckily, there’s hopes that the market will keep rebalancing the rates on their way to improve as early as the second quarter. What a scary circumstance for all truckers to worry about when it comes to the state of spot rates.
There still remains hopes that the freight season will pick up with the imminent Spring season. But, given the modern-day climate, there hasn’t been results so positive since 2019. And even then, COVID had heightened during Spring freight during the year of 2020. Whereas 2021 showed an upward trend all through the year. All while the past years’ rates have jumped early with fuel.
The FTR Transportation Intelligence / Truckstop.com spot market snapshot has been able to develop new trends to an extent with plenty of numbers displaying the week-over-week moves in metrics for about seven days. All restarting as soon as the last Sunday. Within the spot market, there’s been falling rates since the holiday surge has occurred in December. All while the declines track with seasonal expectations. Broker-posted rates in refrigerated and dry van trucks as well.
Throughout the strength of spot rates, there are clearly a couple instances where spot rates are becoming more firm in February. Loads have been available in comparison to the weakness seen in the five-year average.
Lately, the rates situation has dropped so massively, there’s a real opportunity for scams that feature unbelievable rates that everyone in trucking should be excited for.
There was an instance where an owner-operator got stuck in that big Texas storm, while looking for the payment on a $2,500 load that was booked via a brokerage identity-theft case. The flatbed load in this instance had been moved around at a rate of $6.70 per mile. Furthermore, the rate itself had been a fraud unfortunately. In which case, the owner-operator had been paid that rate. The broker had been on the road with the load while involving identity theft to cover up the tracks.
There’s a lesson to be learned from all this…
It’s wiser to learn about everyone you’re dealing with every rate you interact with than to turn a blind eye. You have to make sure that everything done on your part is done with due diligence. This involves watching out for email addresses arriving from a bunch of different domains whom the fraudster believes it could be represented by, all while email addresses being crafted under a bunch of similar gmails that would resemble the names of real companies. Identity-thieves are everywhere, including in logistics. So there’s a likelihood that owner-operators will have to keep up with their own consistency on power-only carriers.
