Is there a correlation between water pressure and epiphanies?
I just drove six hours from my parents’ place on Oseetah Lake in Saranac Lake to my girlfriend’s parents’ house in Mount Sinai, Long Island.
Their guest shower has outstanding water pressure. Apparently good enough to knock a freight-market theory loose.
Yards are the physical exchanges of freight.
Modern trading posts. Places where freight, equipment, information, and responsibility change hands. The rate gets negotiated somewhere else. The yard is where the facility and the carrier have to make the deal work.
I’ve spent ten years advising freight and freight tech companies. Advising shippers directly is newer territory for me. My work at YardFlow has me looking at familiar problems from the customer’s side of the table. This is one I keep coming back to.
We can buy transportation digitally, then make the driver walk paperwork between offices to get the freight moving.
If the information already exists, but the driver has to carry it between systems that don’t talk, we’ve turned transportation capacity into an office temp.
That is not process. That is procedural bullsh*t.
The driver and the people at the gate are stuck making it work. Meanwhile, the truck’s next job is getting harder to reach.
That’s where the exchange metaphor gets interesting.
A carrier has to make the whole trip work economically. The rate matters, but so do the hours required to earn it and the opportunity waiting at the other end.
Consider two otherwise similar loads on the same lane, at the same rate. One facility has the freight ready and gets the truck out in time for its next pickup. The other turns pickup into a three-hour guessing game.
Those loads might look interchangeable on a procurement spreadsheet. They are very different businesses for the truck hauling them.
Predictability matters, too. A dispatcher can plan around a known wait. “Could be twenty minutes, could be three hours” makes the rest of the day a gamble.
ATRI’s 2024 detention research estimated that U.S. for-hire trucking lost more than 135 million hours to detention in 2023. It also found that fleets received payment on fewer than half of the detention invoices they issued.
That second finding belongs in the conversation whenever someone says, “We don’t spend much on detention.”
A small detention bill can coexist with a very expensive facility.
Some of the cost may be sitting in the carrier’s business. Your operation consumed the time whether you received an invoice for it or not.
When capacity is plentiful, a carrier may tolerate an unattractive pickup to keep the truck working. That can make an inefficient facility look cheaper to serve than it really is.
Give that carrier more profitable alternatives and the calculation changes.
Now your freight may need a higher rate to make sense. Or the carrier may simply prefer another load.
A 2024 MIT study of truckload procurement describes how unexpected operating requirements can lead carriers to seek higher rates or reject loads. Facility dwell and operating hours are among the details it says shippers should disclose during bidding.
Nobody has to put “your yard sucks” on the invoice for your yard to affect the price.
This is why I think the driver experience deserves a serious place in transportation strategy. A ready trailer, clear instructions, and a predictable release give a carrier something it can plan a business around.
Across a network of facilities, that’s worth understanding before the next procurement event.
For Monday morning, I’d start with a question for a carrier you want to keep:
What would we have to change at our facilities to make our freight better business for you to haul?
Then look at the visits behind the answer. Count the queue before check-in and the waiting after loading. Separate a live unload from a trailer swap. Find the avoidable delay, fix it, and bring evidence of the improvement into the next bid.
You’ve given the carrier a reason to sharpen its price that can survive a change in the market.
The question I’d leave with anyone buying freight is this:
How much of your transportation strategy depends on carriers not having a better option?
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