Paradigm Logistics, LLC, 4 Terry Drive, Suite #17, Newtown, PA (2026)

03/15/2023

Shipment data captured by payment services provider Cass Information Systems was only off modestly in February while freight costs plummeted on a tough comp.

The Cass Freight Index registered a 0.3% year-over-year (y/y) decline in shipments while the expenditures component of the data set, which measures the total costs associated with shipping freight, fell 9.7% y/y. The costs index was up against a tough comp (up 42.2% y/y in February 2022).

Shipments were up 3.8% from January after five months of declines. On a seasonally adjusted basis, the index was down just 0.3% sequentially, “extending a streak of remarkable stability from October through February,” ACT Research’s Tim Denoyer said.

“Soft real retail sales trends and ongoing destocking remain the primary headwinds to freight volumes, and sharp import declines suggest this type of environment will persist for several more months,” Denoyer added.

03/13/2023

When questions were raised in the past about whether Uber Freight fit into the broader value proposition of the Uber parent, those questions were answered by such bold steps as taking on more than $1 billion in outside investments to propel growth or by buying Transplace, merging upstream and downstream parts of the supply chain.

The steps seemed to say that digital brokerage Uber Freight was here to stay within Uber’s larger portfolio of businesses.

Now Bloomberg has reported that Uber is studying whether to spin off Uber Freight as a sale or as a stand-alone publicly traded company.

The Bloomberg report said Uber “is discussing its options with potential advisers,” citing “people familiar with the matter.” A spokesman for Uber Freight declined comment.

Even with the integration of Transplace complete by the end of 2021, Uber Freight slipped into negative earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization in 2022’s fourth quarter after being barely EBITDA positive in the third quarter ($1 million) after a $5 million positive EBITDA in the second quarter. EBITDA was positive in the first quarter of 2022, the first to reflect the Transplace acquisition.

Uber Freight revenue in the fourth quarter fell 43% from the same period a year earlier and for the year came in at just under $7 billion. That figure would include revenue from the legacy Transplace business.

03/07/2023

Transportation prices fell in February at the fastest rate recorded in the six-and-a-half-year history of a monthly survey of supply chain executives.

The Logistics Managers’ Index (LMI) registered a reading of 36.1 for transportation costs in February, 5.9 percentage points lower than in January and below the prior record, which was established in December.

A level below 50 indicates contraction while one above signals expansion.

The report said the rate declines were “a little more pronounced in the later portions of the month than in the beginning of the month.”

“February is generally a low point seasonally due to the consumer spending hangover from the holidays in the U.S. combined with slowness in imports due to Chinese New Year, and that was certainly reflected this year,” the report stated.

It also acknowledged the large sequential decline from January was likely tied to severe winter storms in December, which pushed shipments into January, providing a bump in demand and the rate index.

03/01/2023

In week 6 of 2023, the overall average van spot rates decreased by $0.004 compared to the previous week’s average rates.

Spot rates decreased in all regions; Northeast and West regions showed the highest decreases of $0.09 each, compared to the previous week’s average rates.

Re**er lanes rates above 250 miles show a decrease of $0.02 compared to the prior week’s average rate. Spot volumes are on par with 2018 levels.

February is typically the slowest month of the year for truckload markets, and that seasonal trend is playing out in national average rates and load-to-truck ratios. While capacity is loose at the national level, we’re seeing markets tighten in the southern states.

02/28/2023

Five people, including two UPS Inc. employees, were arrested last week on charges of conspiracy to possess with intent to distribute co***ne using the company’s packages and possession with intent to distribute the drug, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Texas said Monday.

Among those arrested, according to the multicount indictment unsealed last week, were Orlando Candelario Almanza, 49, and Fidencio Salinas Jr., 51, both of whom have worked for the Atlanta-based company in unspecified roles. Both were scheduled to appear in court Monday morning.

According to the indictment, on multiple occasions between March 24 and Oct. 3, 2022, the five individuals knowingly conspired to transport co***ne through UPS (NYSE: UPS) packages. The charges allege that Javier Enrique Mendoza, 48, and Jose Felipe Lozano, 58, two of the others arrested, provided the co***ne packages to company employees. At the same time, Lozano allegedly provided fraudulent labels for the packages.

A fifth individual, Enrique Bernardo Gamez, 45, stored the co***ne at his residence prior to transport, according to the federal charges.

Law enforcement seized about 60 kilograms of the co***ne these individuals allegedly trafficked, according to a statement from the U.S. attorney’s office.

If convicted, the defendants all face up to life in prison and a possible $10 million fine.

02/23/2023

In a time of record-low unemployment, a crucial segment of the supply chain has seen massive job cuts: the freight brokerage industry.

Freight brokerage companies have cut nearly 1,000 jobs in mass layoffs in 2023. Brokers slashed more than 700 payrolls the previous year.

Such layoffs aren’t surprising to those who have followed supply-chain news the last few years. Through the middle of 2020 to the end of ’21, all modes of freight transportation were unusually hot.

The ratio of inventories to sales dropped to a record low by June 2020, indicating retailers had unusually low levels of merchandise to meet consumer demand. That ratio dipped even lower through 2020 and much of ’21 before beginning to slowly climb up again by November 2021.

Such demand for merchandise translated to more freight demand. The amount of shippers calling for more transportation capacity shot up quickly in spring and summer 2020 as consumers began to spend their stimulus bucks and paychecks on durable goods, like exercise bikes and outdoor furniture. However, that freight capacity didn’t reenter the market at the same time.

That meant shippers that normally handled their freight transportation needs in-house had to go to some sort of intermediary, said Benchmark transportation analyst Chris Kuhn.

This made freight brokers unusually rich. C.H. Robinson, the Eden Prairie, Minnesota-based freight brokerage giant, saw its net income jump by 66.7% in 2021 compared to the year before.

“There was just this lack of capacity in the market,” Kuhn said. “That drove prices up to unprecedented levels.”

As a result, third-party freight companies needed to scale up their hiring, too, according to Wells Fargo senior analyst Allison Poliniak-Cusic. C.H. Robinson, for example, grew its overall head count by 43% by the end of 2021 compared to the previous year.

“I would almost call it crisis hiring,” Poliniak-Cusic told FreightWaves. “[They were] building that head count up to manage some of the unusual volatility in the market that they were dealing with at the time to make sure the customers’ issues were met.”

This bull run crashed in spring and summer 2022. Consumer demand began to moderate in early ’22, as some started spending cash on travel or other in-person services while others braced for inflation. In the months following, some of the largest freight brokers and forwarding companies have reduced head counts.

02/21/2023

Coyote Logistics, a wholly owned subsidiary of UPS Inc., is expected to announce that it will lay off approximately 200 people, according to people familiar with the matter.

It was not immediately clear where the layoffs will occur. At the end of January, rumors spread that layoffs would be concentrated on Coyote’s Large Enterprise operations teams, the staff who are dedicated to Coyote’s largest shipper accounts. Significantly lower truckload volumes at Coyote, which sources said dropped from over 8,000 non-UPS loads per day to approximately 6,100 non-UPS loads per day over the past year, meant that operations teams were underutilized.

But sources spoke to FreightWaves about a conflict between Coyote and UPS management regarding which employees would be terminated, delaying the layoff until Feb. 16. The first list that Coyote’s middle managers generated was adjusted and broadened to conform to UPS’ diversity, equity and inclusion mandate that underrepresented groups were not to be disproportionately impacted by the cuts. “Low performers” across all divisions, not limited to mostly Large Enterprise, will be affected by Friday’s cut, with an emphasis on non-revenue-generating cost centers like IT and operations.

In 2015, UPS acquired Coyote for $1.8 billion, about one times revenue that year. Since then, Coyote has doubled in size, with estimated 2022 revenue of $3.8 billion. Coyote’s revenue story hasn’t always been up and to the right, though: 2022 revenue was markedly lower than 2021’s $4.7 billion.

In the past several years, UPS corporate management has made a series of changes to the brokerage, including reducing incentive-based compensation, removing carrier reps’ visibility into their margins per load and aggressively enforcing noncompete clauses — even against non-revenue-generating employees like carrier reps — in an attempt to reduce churn and control costs.
In 2020, Coyote laid off 55 people — 30 IT workers from its Chicago headquarters and 25 carrier representatives at its Chattanooga office.

The layoffs at Coyote come at a time of widespread reductions in head count across the transportation and logistics industry.

02/16/2023

The Feb. 3 derailment of a Norfolk Southern train in Ohio released more toxic chemicals than first reported, according to a report NS provided to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

The NS (NYSE: NSC) train was traveling in East Palestine, Ohio, near the border with Pennsylvania when the accident occurred. The derailment involved 10 rail cars carrying hazardous materials, with five of those hazmat cars carrying vinyl chloride, a toxic chemical and flammable liquid, according to the National Transportation Safety Board. NS successfully vented and burned the vinyl chloride from those tank cars in a controlled procedure days after the derailment.

But other chemicals have been released into the air or the ground, and NS is still determining how much was released. According to the report provided by NS on Sunday, a tank car carrying stabilized butyl acrylate, a highly flammable liquid used for making paints, sealants and adhesive, had its head branched and its contents spilled or burned in the derailment fire. A tank car carrying ethylhexyl acrylate, a combustible liquid that is used to make paint and plastics, had its head breached, but the amount of product that remained in the car is still pending. And a tank car carrying ethylene glycol monobutyl ether, a flammable liquid that is used in consumer products such as spot removers, cosmetics and paints and with vapors that can irritate the skin and eyes, is of unknown status.
The EPA noted that it is utilizing air monitoring devices used for indoor air screening as part of a voluntary home screening effort and that these devices can detect vinyl chloride and other chemicals of concern from the derailment. In a Monday update, the EPA said community air monitoring will continue to operate 24 hours a day with 291 homes screened as of Sunday evening and no detections of vinyl chloride or hydrogen chloride identified. Another 181 homes still need screening, according to the EPA.

The EPA also said it will hold NS accountable for cleanup costs at the site.

02/15/2023

In Week 5 of 2023, the Overall Average Van Spot Rates Decreased by $0.01 compared to the previous week’s average rates.

Spot rates decreased in some regions while others remain the same compared to last week; the Northeast region showed the highest decrease of $0.008, and the Southeast and Southwest regions remained the same compared to the previous week’s average spot rates.

Re**er lanes rates above 250 miles show a decrease of $0.03 compared to the prior week’s average rate.

DAT trendiness show that Spot market gets end-of-month boost; Load-to-truck ratios rise to close out January.

Capacity tightened at the end of January, creating higher load-to-truck ratios on the DAT One Network. While that stemmed some of the declining rates we had been seeing on the spot market, national rates for each equipment type were down as a monthly average in January compared to December.

As we enter 2023, we see the truckload market transitioning from the late-cycle stage to the bottoming stage. Some of the recent rises in spot rates, ex-fuel, is due to seasonality, as rates surged toward the end of peak season, and some of it is the .70 our gallon drop in diesel prices in the past two months. Those gains tend to be competed away in loose markets like 2022 within a few weeks but have held so far.

02/14/2023

Something unusual happens in Miami, Florida, in weeks before Valentine's Day. The city fills with flowers and thousands of trucks swarm South to redistribute them all over the US.

"There's not a lot of freight in the South Florida markets," Robert Rouse, product manager for truckload freight marketplace and data analytics platform DAT Freight & Analytics, told Insider. "But when those flowers start moving, man, it gets crazy."

Usually, Miami is a "freight desert," or a market that consumes more than it produces. For the majority of the year, there aren't that many things produced in Miami and the surrounding areas that need to be picked up by trucks and hauled up North.

That all changes as Valentine's day approaches.

According to data from DAT Freight & Analytics, during the first week of February, the load volume for refrigerated trucks - the type of truck that carries flowers - increased 77% compared to the week before. In the six weeks leading up to February 14th, around 500 truckloads of roses leave Miami every day.

This year, US consumers are projected to spend a record $25.6 billion on Valentine's day, up to $23.9 billion in 2022, according to the National Retail Federation and flowers will constitute 37% of the gift-giving.

The overwhelming majority of Valentine's day roses and carnations come from Colombia and Ecuador, which are conveniently just a few hours plane ride from Miami. Miami International Airport receives 91% of all flowers imported in the US.

The city, which also sees fresh cargo such as strawberries and citrus, happens to be one of best equipped to handle refrigerated cargo in the US. And since many of the flowers will then be put on another plane, and shipped to Asia and Europe, it's better to send them there and put them on trucks instead of sending them directly to the big cities across the US.

02/10/2023

People aren’t buying as much beer as they used to, and it’s not a great indicator for the economy.

U.S. beer shipment to wholesalers declined 14.1% in December 2022 compared to the year prior, according to a Wells Fargo note published on Jan. 27. Compared to 2020, shipping volume is down 19.4%. We saw the lowest volume since 2012 in December.

It’s not as clear as saying that people simply don’t want beer, or that consumers are becoming more budget-conscious. There are a few factors afoot here.

Beer became suddenly pricey at the end of last year. Beer prices at retail, which doesn’t include bars or restaurants, popped 7% during the last 13 weeks of 2022, according to industry data provider Bump Williams Consulting. This is an unusually high increase, the consulting firm said.

That price increase is showing up in how people are buying brews, said Dave Williams, vice president of Bump Williams Consulting. People are increasingly buying, say, 12-packs over 30-packs or even single servings of beer.

They’re trading down too — snagging the more economic Keystone over comparatively pricey Coors. That explains why the “below premium” segment was the only one to see an increase in demand in January compared to January 2022, according to the National Beer Wholesalers Association’s Beer Purchasers’ Index.

02/08/2023

The end of 2022 saw a surge in cargo thefts that pushed the yearly total to above an estimated $223 million worth of goods stolen across Canada and the U.S., according to recent data from CargoNet.

The Verisk Analytics-owned data firm, which tracks voluntarily reported cargo thefts, recorded 1,778 “supply chain risk incidents” in Canada and the U.S. in 2022, a 15% jump compared to 2021.

“The No. 1 commodity [for cargo theft] was household goods for all of 2022, electronics was No. 2, and then food and beverage commodities were No. 3,” Scott Cornell, transportation lead and crime and theft specialist at Travelers, told FreightWaves.

California led the way with 417 reported cargo thefts in 2022, a 41% year-over-year increase, followed by Texas with 223 and Florida with 153.

CargoNet’s 2022 data showed the average value of cargo stolen in a theft was $214,104, a 20% increase compared to 2021.

Cargo theft hot spots are typically areas around major ports, as well as intermodal facilities, distribution centers and truck stops.

Paradigm Logistics, LLC

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