Your carrier may forget how you treated them last year. They still know how long you’re keeping their truck today.
I’m heading to Chicago this morning for the JOC Inland Distribution Conference, and there’s one session on Wednesday I can’t stop thinking about.
It has an appropriately uncomfortable title:
“Partnership Until the Market Turns: The Uncomfortable Truth About Shipper of Choice.”
For years, shippers have been told some version of the same thing.
Be a good partner.
Tender consistently. Forecast accurately. Pay fairly. Treat drivers well. Turn trucks quickly. Build the relationship when capacity is loose so the carrier remembers you when capacity gets tight.
Makes sense.
There’s just one problem.
In other words:
If a shipper behaves well when it has leverage, does the carrier remember and return the favor when leverage swings back?
Their answer was not particularly comforting.
Carriers appeared to have short memories.
Historical pricing, tendering behavior and performance did not meaningfully protect the shipper later when carriers had more leverage.
Yesterday’s goodwill did not necessarily buy tomorrow’s truck.
But there is a second finding that I think is considerably more interesting.
Carriers responded to what the shipper was doing right now.
Competitive pricing mattered.
Consistent freight mattered.
And destination dwell mattered.
That changes how I think about “Shipper of Choice.”
Maybe it isn’t a status you earn.
Maybe it’s an operating condition you have to maintain.
The rate tells you what the truck costs.
Your operation determines how much truck you actually get.
We tend to discuss transportation capacity as if it is something the market supplies to a shipper.
Number of trucks.
Number of drivers.
Tender acceptance.
Spot availability.
Contract capacity.
But a truck arriving at a facility with eleven available driving hours does not mean the network gets eleven productive hours from it.
Some of those minutes disappear waiting for an appointment.
Some disappear at the gate.
Some disappear waiting for a door.
Some disappear loading or unloading.
Some disappear looking for a trailer.
Some disappear trying to figure out where the hell Row C is.
The truck still exists.
The driver still exists.
We just consumed some of their capacity without moving any freight.
That distinction gets more important when capacity tightens.
JOC is opening Inland26’s main program Tuesday with an unusual freight-market story: the 2026 market turn has been driven not primarily by surging demand, but by an unexpectedly sharp contraction in available truck capacity.
Which raises a question I don’t hear asked often enough:
How much transportation capacity are shippers accidentally manufacturing or destroying inside their own facilities?
We have measured this backwards
Most facilities measure detention.
That makes sense. Detention has an invoice attached to it.
But detention is the bill you receive after the operating failure.
I’m increasingly interested in the thing that disappeared before the bill arrived:
productive carrier hours.
Take a hypothetical network making 100,000 truck turns a year.
Improve each turn by 24 minutes.
That returns 40,000 truck-hours to the transportation network.
No new tractors.
No new drivers.
No new carrier.
No autonomous anything.
Just more productive capacity from the physical network you already had.
I have some reason to believe this is more than spreadsheet philosophy.
FreightWaves reported last week that a beverage shipper is expanding YardFlow across 200-plus facilities after an initial 26-site deployment where it moved nearly 5% more freight with the same headcount, according to our analysis.
That does not prove my broader transportation thesis.
But it is enough to make me want to investigate it.
So I’m taking the question to Chicago
I spent most of the last decade around brokers, carriers and freight tech.
I’m relatively new to advising the people on the other side of the fence.
Which means this is one of those weeks where I’d rather ask the people actually buying and providing the capacity than pretend I already know the answer.
I want to know:
Do carriers actually price a slow facility differently?
Does a fast facility improve tender acceptance?
When trucks get scarce, does the carrier allocate equipment differently?
Do transportation procurement teams know which facilities in their own networks are easiest to serve?
Does facility performance ever make it into an RFP?
And if it does, can anybody put an actual dollar value on a productive carrier hour?
There is a much bigger implication if the answers are yes.
Yard performance stops being only a warehouse-efficiency problem.
It becomes part of transportation strategy.
Maybe “Shipper of Choice” is the wrong noun.
That’s the thesis I’m taking into Inland26.
The MIT research suggests carriers may not keep a lifetime loyalty score for shippers.
Fine.
A goldfish still knows what is happening to it right now.
If the truck you need is sitting behind six other trucks at your gate, the transportation market did not create all of your capacity problem.
Some of it may be sitting in your yard.
Monday Morning Yards Quarterback #3
I’ll report back after I ask people who actually know.
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