Perhaps, but the Oak Harbor rep told me the company was tired of Amazon hogging trailers and demanded a one for one swap prior to being suspended as a carrier. Occam’s Razor points the finger at Amazon not liking demands.
Amazon’s policy is probably something like Amazon solely dictates how long they’ll keep the trailer, so the freight company essentially saying they’re refusing to comply with that policy going forward = suspended.
Most businesses don’t have the power to have this kind of attitude, but Amazon does so they might as well use it. They’re basically making everyone else have to do a bunch of extra work to make Amazon’s side of things run smoothly at no additional cost to Amazon. If they make trucking companies go bankrupt, that’s great for Amazon, they’ll buy their trailers out of bankruptcy and hire their drivers.
Amazon does not dictate a policy to a carrier that is not utilizing the partnered carrier program, anymore than you can dictate a truck wait at your house while you get groceries at the store and your kids from school. A courtesy is not policy. A regional carrier explained it to us and how the entire Carrier Central appointment works when not a APC shipment. There is a block of time, but its completely hypocritical for Amazon.
Like Hotel California, you can check out but you can never leave…
Well, it sounds like they’re telling people to wait indefinitely until the FC has a free dock, and if you leave/raise some issue about it too many times, they penalize you by blocking access to their FCs, which basically kills any future business for picking up FBA shipments.
Amazon has the power to dictate the terms here. Carriers may need the business generated from delivering FBA bound shipments, Amazon does not need them since if they blacklist them, sellers have to choose another carrier (or use the partnered one). And if it’s a high volume customer, they might switch all their business away from that carrier if they’re unable to do FBA deliveries because they don’t want to work with 2 different freight companies.
Amazon like many other business, has a hard time correctly learning who needs who more. The whole Yellow/YRC issue will make even Amazon question trying to puppeteer other business’. Amazon is big, but not big enough to change basic economics when a truck sits for hours, where the rest of the economy won’t.
They are learning the same lesson with warehouse acquisition, and finding haulers for their Amazon Freight LTL program when container chassis haulers are paying 2x the current bid rate, now that the ports are unclogged.
Amazon is expanding their own network. You can see this with them beginning to pick up FBA inbound with the smile vans (I haven’t seen that option lately, but they definitely trialed it last year). It will be interesting to see how it plays out with how they treat carriers at FCs. A lot of carriers will likely just pass the cost on to the shipper if they’re made to wait all day at the FC. If you ship freight and the recipient doesn’t accept it or causes an undue delay in receiving it, you’ll get billed for that. I wouldn’t be surprised if some companies are already billing shippers for every hour they’re made to wait at a FC.
It’s not just freight either, they make UPS hold onto packages for excessive delays sometimes. I’ve seen the “carrier delay message has occurred” for over a week at times.
Which means they cannot tell everyone to pound sand yet.
This was always a plan to make money on the backhaul so vans and trucks are not empty deadheading costing money.
Yes, as they have watched their largest APC carrier vanish and have removed several carriers via internal ineptitude coupled with rigid policies.
No carrier can simply absorb the cost of a single truck sitting all day for a few pallets. The carriers will go elsewhere just like Amazon is learning with container haulers near rail and port handling facilities. The bid boards for relay are going un bidded and missed pickups in Omaha, Houston, Oakland, Seattle. Why would a driver take a 1400$ Load for a 10 hour day when they can do one for 6 hours, or in the competent ones, two loads?
You know you suck at logistics when a driver can get a port container and chassis 2x faster than an Amazon trailer LOL. Thursday, a regional carrier said they won’t be back till the math changes, because they can pick up two containers from the port of Oakland with 4 hour live loads faster than 1 Amazon relay pickup cycle, because they have hours of waiting on both ends of the route. No CEO of a national chain will raise tariff cards simply because of Amazon, they will simply stop shipping there based on the economics of service.
I assert it is like military bases, some carriers simply will not go through the hassle of screening for hours even if they have an appointment surcharge, and as the hours increase more will simply say no.
Not within reason. We have regular shipments/deliveries that are re-delivered without fee for a myriad of reasons.
Theoretically this issue shouldn’t exist, but it does because Amazon’s probably setting an unrealistic number for how many minutes a trailer should take to unload, and as a result is overbooking slots.
Personally I’ve found using LTL to ship to FBA as a seller to be a pain in the azz, and for what I sell the cost savings aren’t worth it. I did a 100 box shipment last week and the cost difference between SPD and LTL was only like $100 (partly because the way they wanted it split would send 2 boxes to 1 of the locations, gtfo of here with that, that’s basically an empty pallet). Sellers of larger items often don’t have a choice though.
Well they have burned through all the cheap labor in numerous impoverished communities with high unemployment, coupled with newer generations that are refusing to work like a robot by being on a timer that measures the amount of urine one produces every 2.5 hours. Amazon is running out mall conversions and poor communities to leech from and have higher turnover resulting in lower efficiency.
How many of you have seen this for the last year??
This is not a temporary issue, it is a long term problem.
Well, Amazon IS trying to solve the long term problem by using robots to well, work like robots.
The labor problem is well underway though and they’re not close to fully automating warehouses yet.
Well, that is a problem too. Not enough tradespeople to work on robots either. Generations of people with social outrage degrees, can’t tell the difference between a screwdriver and hammer, because mommy and daddy mandated college because of the Jones’.
This is why plumbers make as much as many STEM grads.
LTL for us = 1.7 cents per unit freight.
SPD for us = 6.3 cents per unit freight.
Rebates on splits for SPD make up most of the difference but it’s a lot more labor and opens us up for multiple “Shipment Problems” if FBA says our perfectly good barcodes don’t scan which happens…
They will always tag a small amount (20 units out of 5500), but if we send lots of smaller shipments SPD, each of them could get tagged and then we have a problem.
Everyone is different and our items are tiny which makes a big difference.
To be fair. We are going from NY to NJ most of the time so it’s cheap.
Amazon Freight is $96
Amazon Partnered is $114
It’s the same price obviously if it’s 1000 units or 6000 (max we can fit on a 72" Pallet).
Are you really paying those Prep prices? Yikes. I’d do that ■■■■ myself to save that kind of cash…
We have no prep - FNSKU is on our trade dress and the 2-packs we sell we band in house on a machine which does cost something…
I figure it’d cost me at least half that amount anyway to hire people to do it, and it would slow things down and we have to deal with additional employees. And scaling things up or down isn’t as easy either. We’re talking about opening 100 boxes, pulling 100 pieces out of each one, labeling every one and repacking it. That’s not a trivial amount of work.
You’re talking to a guy, who in his mid-40’s, hand assembled 30K+ 2 packs with a desktop shrink cutter and a heat gun, plus added the FNSKU and do not separate stickers…
Back breaking, carpal tunnel inducing, mind numbing work that I spent who knows how many weeks, 18 hours a day doing (when shipments were ready).
I used to rent a van, go to my supplier (80 mile round trip), load the van, drive back, unload the van in my basement and then get to work, sometimes around the clock. The van trips had to be covert operations too because there’s a neighbor over here that would report me for operating a business out of my house which is illegal in this civic area that has it’s own rules… I used to stalk my own neighborhood to make sure she wasn’t out and about and take out the fuse for the Beep Beep backup signal in the van so she wouldn’t be disturbed…
All to save 55 cents a unit… I look back fondly on those times actually because I don’t have to do that anymore and it will be even more fun to look back on when my / our ultimate goal is met.
After the 2-packs were ready, I would box them up in shippers, label the boxes, and cart them to the UPS hub in my small car, sometimes having to make 4, 20 mile round trips a day. My time was valued at nothing back then and after all that work, with some expense for fuel and vans, I actually wasn’t saving all that much but all of those expenses never even got remotely close to the $16K in savings during that period of time.
Gotta start somewhere and I don’t blame you for working smarter rather than harder. I didn’t have a choice financially in 2018-2020.
Oh yea?! Well I had to do the same thing, only walking uphill both ways in a tsunami snowstorm, wearing swim fins and a winter jacket, surviving on uncrustable sandwiches that would never thaw. It was so cold, I had to find and rub two feral cats together to thaw the zipper ice before I could take off my jacket.
That was a good one my friend!
LOL
I don’t consider myself overdramatic but maybe. I tell a lot of stories and sadly, they are all very true.
Adds to character.
Just wanted to say I love this and thanks for sharing. This is us right now and you are my inspiration to keep on going at it.
-Ana
All that I have been through since 2017 has been an amazing inspiration to my 19 year old daughter. Full time college student, working 2 jobs, and in the gym 6 days a week, ripped to shreds… 
Before my previous employer suddenly went bankrupt, we had money falling out of our pockets and things were easy.
All of the hardship / tough times will be worth it if my kids understand the value of hard work and I think they do. That quality is getting rarer and rarer…
Sometimes the whole family would gather with me to form an assembly line back in the day to get the 2-packs done. Each of the 4 of us had a job. It was fun actually.