TruckerDoom followup
So in phone consultation with BCE earlier, he mentioned that Bayou Pete had taken notice of one of my earlier posts wherein I quoted my brother’s dire warning that, if diesel prices rise much more (which, they’re gonna), thousands of drivers will be giving up and getting out of the business. Here’s a portion of Pete’s lament:
What does that mean in raw figures?
- Owner-Operators primarily operate Class 8 Trucks (33,001 pounds and greater). There were approximately 2.9 million registered combination trucks (tractor-trailers) in 2018.
- There are approximately 350,000 owner operators driving in the United States today…Owner Operators make up 9% of the truckers on the road today.
- Nearly 1.5 million people work for the 124,320 employer businesses in this industry, and another 587,000 are self-employed, or “nonemployers” … These nonemployers (assuming one person per business) make up nearly 29% of the workers in the industry.
So, if independent owner-operators have to park their trucks because they can’t recover their fuel costs from their customers, we’re talking about a 10% reduction in the number of trucks available to haul freight – this on top of an existing supply chain crunch that’s got every truck running as hard as it can, all day, every day, just to try to keep pace. We’re also talking about a quarter to a third of those involved in the trucking industry being out of work.
Our supply chain simply can’t handle such losses. It’ll be crippled.
Yep, t’will…along with just about everything else. Remember the trucker’s mantra: If you have it, a truck brought it. Sorry to say, but today my brother had more bad tidings. His current rig, a Freightliner Classic XL with rebuilt engine and tranny, a new clutch, and some other goodies, to include oversize 150 gallon fuel tanks (those big chrome drums you can see on most all trucks under the doors on eah side, unless they’re hidden behind some plastic covers). This afternoon on the way back from Charleston it cost him nearly 700 smackers to fill just halfway up.
As of about a half hour ago, Little Bro hasn’t decided whether he’s gonna work tomorrow yet.
Be sure to click through to catch Peter’s closing ‘graphs. It’s just as he says: all these things—trucker shortages, bare store shelves, absurdly high fuel costs, systemic Bidenflation—have a common root cause, which can be found in Mordor On The Potomac.
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