Supply Chain Action Points
Read this first — the conclusion, and the moves to make:
- Today, separate every flatbed and reefer load you expect in the next four weeks from your dry-van volume; 43.1 and 11.2 loads per truck cannot be planned with one rule.
- Call two flatbed carriers per lane this week and ask for a committed truck count per week at a fixed rate through the end of August, then accept the number instead of shopping it.
- Move your posting horizon on flatbed loads from same-day to at least five business days, and track weekly tender acceptance against a 90% target.
- Re-quote every inland leg in your landed cost before the next customer price review, using $3.50 to $3.70 a mile for flatbed and $3.30 to $3.50 for reefer rather than last year's assumption.
- Set one watch trigger on the flatbed load-to-truck ratio: below 30 means the squeeze is easing and spot shopping works again, above 43 means buy access rather than price.
RIM Logistics' 7 July inland digest put dry-van spot rates at about $2.80-$3.10 per mile, flatbed at $3.50-$3.70 and reefer at $3.30-$3.50, with capacity tightening from carrier exits and regulation. The dry-van load-to-truck ratio hovered around 11.2 and flatbed at 43.1, while diesel eased toward $4.67/gal, giving carriers margin relief.
The Analysis
There is a number in this digest that people scroll past, and it is the only one that changes what I do on a Monday. RIM Logistics put dry-van spot at roughly $2.80 to $3.10 a mile on 7 July, reefer at $3.30 to $3.50, flatbed at $3.50 to $3.70. Diesel eased to about $4.67 a gallon. Capacity is tightening, the report says, on carrier exits and regulation.
Look at the load-to-truck ratios instead of the rates. Dry van sits near 11.2. Flatbed sits at 43.1. Those are not two prices for the same thing. Those are two different markets wearing one headline.
If your freight rides a flatbed, you are not shopping for a rate this month. You are shopping for a truck, and the honest answer is mostly no.
A truckload move is four physical things: a tractor, a trailer of the right kind, a driver with hours left on the clock, and an appointment window at each end. The rate is the price of all four lining up. When the ratio goes to 43, one of the four is missing, and it usually is not the tractor. It is the trailer that matches the load, or the driver who will take that lane at that hour. You cannot substitute your way out of it either. A van will not carry rebar. A curtain-side will not carry a load that needs a tarp and chains. A reefer trailer with a dead unit is a box, not a reefer.
So read the two ratios as two different sentences. Eleven loads per truck is a working market: you call, you get a number, you argue about it, you book. Forty-three is a queue. Your load joins the back of it, and the only question left is how far back. In a queue, price stops being the thing that allocates the truck. Time does. The shipper who called ten days out gets the truck at the posted number. The shipper who posts same-day gets a higher number and a driver who says he will try.
The report puts the tightening down to carrier exits and regulation, and both of those are slower than they sound. A carrier exit is a tractor parked and a driver who took a job somewhere else. That driver does not come back because a rate ticked up. He comes back when the lane pays enough for him to turn down the other job, which is a hiring cycle, not a week. Regulation does the same work from the cost side: it raises the cost per truck-hour, and the first trucks it removes are the marginal ones, the oldest equipment and the thinnest operators. Those are also the trucks that used to take the awkward loads. Oversize. Multi-stop. Anything that eats a day in the yard.
Diesel at $4.67 is the one line in the report pointing the other way. It gives the carrier margin, and margin is what eventually pulls trucks back into a lane. Watch the sequence, though. The margin arrives in July. The truck arrives after somebody buys a tractor, gets authority, insures it, and finds a driver, and none of that happens on a Monday. The relief is real and it is on a delay measured in months. Which means the rate you pay in the third quarter is not a signal that capacity is coming. It is the price of a market healing too slowly to help you.
Where you feel it depends on the shape of your contract. Spot moves in days. Contract rates move at renewal, and renewal is where the surprise lives. If you bid a flatbed lane in the spring at last year's number and a carrier signed it, he will not cover it in July. He will not call to renegotiate either. You tender the load, nothing moves, and no truck is worse than an expensive truck. Importers get a second layer: the inland leg is usually quoted apart from the ocean leg, so this shows up first on the second invoice, the dray or the domestic move, well before the ocean contract comes up for renewal.
Scale changes the shape of the problem more than the size. A small shipper with one lane and no contract lives on the spot board and pays this week. A mid-size shipper with an annual bid feels it as failed tenders before it feels it as price, and that is the more dangerous version, because a tender nobody covers never shows up in your freight budget, it shows up as a late delivery. A large shipper with a dedicated fleet is largely insulated on cost, but his carrier is hiring from the same driver pool, so the insulation has a shelf life. Direction matters too. Anything leaving an inland origin on a flatbed, machinery, project cargo, steel, is the deepest exposure right now, and it is not the container market, no matter how many times the two get averaged into one story.
Here is my own arithmetic, and the assumptions are mine, not the report's. Take a 600-mile flatbed lane at $3.60 a mile: $2,160. The same lane in a dry van at $2.95: $1,770. The gap is $390 a load, about 22%. Twenty loads a month and you are looking at $7,800. Now the part that matters. That $390 is what you pay when a truck exists. In a 43-to-1 market, some weeks the truck does not exist at any price you would call reasonable, and the load sits. A load sitting for two days costs you the $390 and a customer conversation, and the customer conversation is the expensive half.
The part the headline leaves out is that a 43-to-1 ratio has already stopped being a price market and become an allocation market, and most shippers are still managing it with price tools. Posting the load earlier, and paying the posted number, beats shopping four brokers on a Tuesday for a cheaper rate. The premium for being late now exceeds the spread between carriers. That is a scheduling fact, not a negotiating fact, and it is the one thing you can act on today without touching a single contract.
Flip it and the picture clears. Had diesel stayed high and carriers kept exiting, flatbed would not be sitting at 43, it would be higher, and allocation would turn into an auction where the biggest project in the queue sets the price for everyone behind it. Had the margin relief arrived a quarter earlier, some of those tractors would already be back and the ratio would be drifting down. Neither happened. So watch the ratio, not the rate. If flatbed prints under 30 by early autumn, the squeeze is easing and you can go back to shopping. Until then you are buying access.
The traps here are boring and expensive. Posting a flatbed load on a van broker's board and wondering why nobody calls. Assuming a tarped load is a van load because the dimensions fit. Treating a reefer quote as a box quote when the unit has to run and be inspected. And the classic: signing a flatbed lane at a number that looked fine in April and finding out in July that the contract was a wish.
Go count your flatbed loads for the next four weeks, today, and call the two carriers who actually own flatbed trailers on those lanes. Ask for a committed truck per week at a fixed number, not a rate quote. Take the number they give you. If they will not commit, that is your answer about this market, and it is a better answer than any index.
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