Carriers Have Goldfish Memories. So What Does 'Shipper of Choice' Actually Mean?

There is an MIT freight study with maybe my favorite title in transportation research: “Elephants or Goldfish?”

Dr. Angi Acocella, Chris Caplice and Yossi Sheffi wanted to understand whether truckload carriers remember how shippers treated them when the market eventually turns. In other words, if you gave a carrier consistent freight, paid fairly and generally made yourself easy to do business with during a soft market, does that goodwill stick when capacity tightens and the carrier suddenly has more choices? Are carriers elephants?

Not really. They look a lot more like goldfish.

The research found that carriers respond much more strongly to what a shipper is doing now than to how that shipper behaved in the previous market cycle, which is a pretty important wrinkle in the whole Shipper of Choice conversation. You cannot bank five years of goodwill, slap a Shipper of Choice badge on yourself and assume carriers are going to remember how wonderful you used to be when the economics change.

What have you done for me lately? Especially when capacity is tight and carrier has options, you have to keep earning it.

That means consistent freight, market-competitive rates and, importantly, reducing the amount of carrier capacity you unnecessarily consume at your facilities. MIT’s research specifically calls out destination dwell as one of the behaviors associated with primary carrier acceptance when transportation markets tighten.

The number is worth sitting with.

In their model, one additional hour of destination dwell in a tight market was associated with primary carrier acceptance falling from 89.32% to 87.73%.

That last part is where I think this gets more interesting than the usual detention-is-bad conversation.

A truck is not just capacity attached to your load. It is an expensive mobile asset whose economics depend on what it can do after your load is finished. The driver has a finite clock, the carrier is trying to keep the tractor productive, and dispatch is trying to connect one shipment to the next without adding deadhead or blowing up the rest of the schedule.

Then the truck arrives at your facility and sits there for 90 minutes because somebody cannot find the paperwork, the trailer is not where the system says it is, the dock is not ready, security has a different process than the last facility or nobody seems entirely sure what the driver is supposed to do next.

That is not just a bad driver experience. You have inserted your facility into the carrier’s asset-utilization problem.

I sent Angi a note before Inland because there was one part of the research I wanted to make sure I was understanding correctly. We missed each other in Chicago, but she got back to me on LinkedIn and confirmed the part I found most interesting: the relationship between destination detention and carrier acceptance shows up across the shipper-carrier network, not simply on the individual lane where the truck waited.

That makes intuitive sense once you stop thinking about the truck as belonging to a single shipment.

If a driver loses an hour at one destination, that truck does not disappear when your load is delivered. It still has somewhere else to be. There is another pickup, another appointment, another customer and another piece of the carrier’s network that now has to absorb the lost time.

So the consequences of an inefficient facility do not necessarily stay neatly contained inside that building.

That is where the Shipper of Choice conversation starts to look less like a transportation procurement concept and more like an enterprise operating-model problem.

Large companies spend enormous amounts of money controlling their customer experience. They obsess over brand consistency, store experience, website experience, ordering, fulfillment and every other interaction where a customer touches the company because they understand that inconsistent experiences eventually cost them money.

Then a carrier enters the supply chain network and can get an entirely different version of the company depending on which facility they pull into.

Different appointment systems. Different check-in procedures. Different security requirements. Different paperwork. Different instructions. Different trailer rules. Different visibility into whether the freight is actually ready. Different amounts of time sitting around trying to figure out what is going on.

Internally, those may all be separate facility processes.

The carrier experiences all of them as your company.

That is why I think we sometimes make Shipper of Choice sound softer than it really is. It is not primarily about free coffee, nicer bathrooms or being friendly to drivers, even though all of those things are good. What carriers really want is something much more economically useful: predictability.

Predictable freight volumes, predictable appointment behavior, predictable dwell, predictable trailer availability, predictable turns and, ultimately, predictable economics around the assets they are committing to your network.

If you operate drop-and-hook freight, the objective becomes almost comically straightforward: keep the truck’s wheels moving.

The truck should arrive, authenticate quickly, know where it is supposed to go, drop the trailer, find the outbound trailer, hook it and leave. Every unnecessary minute inside that process is consuming an asset the carrier needs somewhere else, which means operational variability eventually has an economic value attached to it whether the shipper sees an invoice for it directly or not.

This is why I have started thinking about carriers as something like the physical APIs of the enterprise supply chain.

Your TMS can create the transportation plan. Your WMS can get the freight ready. Your ERP can record the transaction. None of those systems physically connects your facility to the outside transportation network.

The carrier does.

And just like a software API, if interacting with your network is slow, unreliable or unpredictable, people eventually start designing around it. In truckload transportation, designing around you can mean rejecting freight, allocating scarce capacity somewhere else, building more buffer into the price or simply prioritizing customers whose freight is easier to plan around.

That brings us back to the goldfish.

There is actually something encouraging about carriers having short memories. If today's operating behavior matters more than yesterday's reputation, then a bad carrier experience is not some permanent scar on the network. Shippers can improve it.

The inverse is also true, though. Yesterday’s reputation does not buy you much protection from today’s bad operation.

You cannot call yourself a Shipper of Choice and expect the label to do the work for you. The transportation department cannot declare it into existence, and procurement cannot negotiate it into a contract.

The physical network has to deliver it, facility by facility and load by load.

So maybe the better question for a shipper is not, “Are we a Shipper of Choice?”

Maybe it is:

If one of our core carriers visits five of our facilities next week, will they feel like they interacted with the same company five times?

I’m increasingly convinced that the answer to that question tells you a lot more.