too many little trucking companies undercutting the bigger companies.
Yeah, but our bread and butter is larger national accounts where we can bundle our Ground/Express parcel and Freight divisions together.
Kind of like how Verizon and AT&T bundle their voice, data, and TV services together into one monthly bill.
In freight, no other LTL besides UPS can do this.
I would love to see a competitor such as Conway start up a parcel division.
Good luck with that...DHL sunk billions upon billions into it and came up dry...and they already had a large international-priorty service in the US.
It's true that these smaller cut-rate outfits usually beat us out on price when dealing with small to mid-sized shippers.
Only trouble is that alot of these outfits are having problems servicing these accounts.
The bottom-dweller rates are forcing them to cram trailers which = higher claims, freight left on the dock, long peddle routes with boatloads of stops, missed pickups, pissed-off drivers, hiring contractors, etc.
People seem to think that LTL is like truckload...and are generally not aware of the service differentiation between companies (on-time%, claims ratios, ease of settling claims, etc).
Either that, or they're under such enormous pressure to get the best rates, that they just don't care about overall value.
I suspect it's probably a little of both.
Eventually, customers will figure out that the cheapest rates aren't always the best (you get what you pay for) and we'll eventually see a so-called "flight to quality" where alot of this business will ride on our trucks even tho we generally charge more.
But this won't happen until truck capacity is reduced, the economy improves, and transportation supply/demand comes back into balance.
