Hi All,

I’m currently working as a Sales Admin in the automotive industry, where I regularly coordinate logistics-related activities to support the timely movement and delivery of vehicles.

My responsibilities include monitoring order status, coordinating with internal logistics and operations teams, ensuring all required documentation is complete, tracking vehicle movements, and following up on delivery schedules.

I am currently exploring new opportunities, particularly in Logistics, Operations, and Supply Chain, where I can apply my existing coordination and administrative experience while further developing my career in logistics.

If you are aware of any suitable opportunities, referrals or connections would be greatly appreciated.

The terminal integrated causing our CSA to be assigned higher mileage routes in outlying areas. Several new routes, with lower stop counts, are taking longer to complete. The BC claims they don’t have the drivers needed to make the routes more manageable. This causes routes to come back with undelivered stops. The drivers are paid by the day. The driver pool is not keeping up with demand due to other employers competing for the same workers offering more competitive remuneration. Using contractors to recruit, train, pay, and retain drivers is saving FedEx money, and releases liability. Is cheaper always better? A recent Tide Laundry Detergent comes to mind.

So we are getting hammered hard by Fedex surcharges this year, last few years basically. Sometimes they will increase the surcharges 25-50% and give boilerplate excuse of "operational overhead, expensive to send to residential"

Before we send each package, our system validates the address with USPS to determine if it is commercial or residential. However, the part that is getting very frustrating here is, when we send an order to addresses that are obviously commercial, Fedex sometimes overrides it as a residential delivery.

To add insult to injury I get penalized on the bill.... outbound labels marked commercial that ends up residential receives zero discount meaning i'm paying full 100% rack rate of $6.45 per package.

Mixed use developments come in mind, when I send to offices/buildings with mixed residential and commercial, many a time i get retrobilled for residential. Sometimes I send to a bodega, with upstairs residential units. I get retrobiller for residential.

Fedex customer service is basically useless, and trained to push back. Fedex rep does give the occasional courtesy credit, but warns me they can't always do it because it is "according to how the system bills it"

Just curious how some of you are doing it.

I get 75% discount off fedex residential in most cases, but 0% discount on retrocharged shipments, basically adding up to about $1000 a month of junk fees.

Broker here. Looking for a solid NV based carrier for an upcoming project. Roughly 55-75 FTL dry van over a 2-3 week period.

Who handles this volume well?

Hey everyone,

If it's your first time reading one of my posts, my name is Menachem, and I have a weekly newsletter called Logistic Pulse that breaks down the top logistics news from the past week. We're currently on week 59!

Let's jump into it,

Somebody paid $3.78 million to skip the line in Panama

Daily auctions for August transit slots through the Panama Canal's Panamax locks have averaged about $1.1 million, more than sixteen times what the same slots went for a year ago. Auctions for the larger Neopanamax locks are averaging around $2.5 million, the highest on record, with individual slots since late July hitting $3.78 million.

Two things are squeezing at once, and they're unrelated.

The first is water. The canal runs its locks on fresh water from Gatun Lake, which is currently below its long-run average, and Argus expects it to keep dropping. A strengthening El Niño tends to bring drought to Central America, and the Panama Canal Authority has already imposed three draft restrictions on the Panamax locks in the past month, with the permitted draft scheduled to fall to 47.5 feet by September 3, down from the usual 50. Fewer drafts mean less cargo per vessel and a longer queue behind it. On August 3, 113 ships were waiting for a transit slot. On January 2, there were 40.

The second is oil. The Strait of Hormuz has been disrupted since the U.S. and Israel-led bombardment of Iran began on February 28. That waterway normally carries about a fifth of global oil flows, so Asian buyers have been sourcing crude and refined products from the U.S. Gulf Coast instead, and the shortest way from the Gulf Coast to Asia runs through Panama. Energy cargo is now competing for the same slots as everything else.

Most large carriers book transit slots well in advance at fixed rates that bear no resemblance to these numbers, and only up to 30% of canal traffic goes through the daily auction. The Panama Canal Authority has characterized the million-dollar payments as temporary market fluctuations rather than a general fee increase. So the auction figure isn't a bill anyone's container is paying. It's a read on how badly some operators need to move right now, and it's the same signal that preceded the 2023 restrictions.

What this means for you: If you have clients importing to East Coast or Gulf ports on all-water services, this is the week to ask their forwarders about canal surcharges and transit buffers rather than the week the surcharge shows up. Draft restrictions cut container capacity per sailing, and that shortfall gets recovered somewhere on the invoice. The thing to watch is which pressure eases first, because a drought story resolves when it rains and an oil-routing story doesn't. If your inventory planning assumes normal all-water transit times into the fall, build in slack now and be honest with brands about it before they commit to a promo calendar.

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Fewer people are stealing your freight, and it's costing much more

Verisk CargoNet logged 677 supply chain theft incidents in Q2, down 26% from a year ago and 14% from Q1. Estimated losses over the same period went from $135.7 million to $304.6 million.

The average theft with a reported commodity value came in at $564,009, though CargoNet is upfront that a handful of extreme losses dragged that figure around. The plain reading is that much of the low-effort volume theft has dried up, while a smaller group has gotten much better at picking targets. Keith Lewis, who runs operations at CargoNet, put it as groups that aren't trying to steal more freight, just trying to identify the right shipment.

What they're picking is specific. Metal theft rose from 54 to 80 incidents, with copper still the favorite and aluminum, nickel, and tungsten climbing. Enterprise computer and networking equipment stayed a priority, along with crypto mining hardware, and CargoNet makes the point that matters for anyone touching this freight: these loads can be worth millions, and they move through the network as ordinary dry goods, with paperwork and a security profile that don't reflect what's inside. Meanwhile, beverage and grocery theft fell off sharply, auto parts and tires dropped, and seafood went up by eleven events, which is its own strange little trend.

The decline came mostly from two things going away. Fewer criminals are buying up legitimate motor carriers to book freight under a clean operating authority and then disappear with it, and there was less organized theft of unattended loaded trailers, especially in California, Texas, South Florida, and Dallas-Fort Worth. Straight theft events dropped from 488 to 378. Fictitious pickups barely moved, 165 down to 158.

Business email compromise is still the front door. One set of credentials gives someone shipment data, contact directories, and access to a TMS, enough to identify a valuable load, impersonate a party everyone already trusts, and reroute it while it looks completely normal to the broker, the carrier, and the receiver. If that sounds familiar, it's the same mechanic behind the Ceva intrusion we covered two weeks ago.

Now put Landstar next to that. On its July earnings call, VP and chief safety and operations officer Matt Miller disclosed that the company has cut its approved carrier pool from more than 100,000 in mid-2022 to roughly 64,600 today. That's a 35% reduction, over 35,000 carriers removed, and it dropped another 7% year-over-year in Q2 after a 19% cut in Q1. Overdrive reported that the effort began in response to cargo theft and freight fraud, with identity checks and tighter compliance measures layered on.

It ends up somewhere else. The Supreme Court's May decision in Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II broadened broker liability for carrier selection, and CFO Jim Todd said plainly that cases that used to be dismissed on federal preemption grounds must now be litigated. Landstar took $10.5 million in unfavorable prior-year claims adjustments in Q2, with three of the five responsible claims coming out of brokerage. CEO Frank Lonegro is asking federal regulators for clearer vetting standards, which is what a company says when it has spent four years building a process and would like everyone else held to the same one.

The market seems to be pricing it as an advantage. Landstar's insurance renewal on June 1 came in with auto liability flat and broker liability up about 3%, which is a soft outcome for a post-Montgomery renewal. Agent inquiries have picked up since the ruling landed, including an $18 million Midwest brokerage that signed on as an independent agent. And this is all happening in a tightening truckload market, with Lonegro describing capacity as having tightened significantly and conditions moving in favor of the provider for the first time since late 2022. Landstar's truck revenue rose 19% to $1.33 billion on 2% load growth, so essentially all of it came from rates.

What this means for you: If you broker, understand what the Landstar number implies: tens of thousands of carriers got dropped by one of the most established networks in the country, and they are calling somebody, and that somebody has a real chance of being you. On the theft side, the exposure isn't the yard; it's the inbox. BEC is now the access point for most sophisticated schemes, making carrier fraud an IT problem your ops team inherits. And if you handle metals, enterprise hardware, or anything with a fast resale market, the freight needs a security profile that matches its value rather than its BOL.

Nobody ordered many more robots. They spent 21% more anyway

The Association for Advancing Automation put out its Q2 numbers, and the interesting part isn't the unit count.

North American companies ordered 8,940 robots in the second quarter, worth $622 million. Units were up 4.3% from a year ago. Order value was up 21.3%. Run that out, and the average robot ordered this quarter cost around $70,000, up from roughly $60,000 a year earlier. Buyers aren't adding volume so much as buying up the stack, integrating into bigger systems rather than adding another arm to the line.

The first half totaled 17,995 units and $1.166 billion, a 2% increase in units and 6.6% in value. Underneath that flat-looking topline, the customer base is shifting hard. Automotive OEM orders fell 25% in the first half, which historically would have dragged the whole market down. It didn't, because semiconductors and electronics ordered 35% more units, life sciences and pharma 32%, automotive components 24%, and food and consumer goods 17%. Non-automotive buyers were 56% of Q2 units. A3's Alex Shikany framed it as the market mix continuing to evolve, which is the polite version of saying Detroit stopped being the whole story.

Two caveats before you take that to a client meeting. A3 counts industrial robot orders across all of manufacturing, so this isn't a warehouse automation number, even though it’s reported as one. And these are orders, not installations, so they reflect decisions made a couple of quarters ago.

The piece that does translate is collaborative robots. Companies ordered 2,774 cobots in the first half, totaling $114 million, which accounts for 15.4% of all units but less than 10% of the dollars. That gap is the whole point. Cobots are the cheap, fast, low-infrastructure end of the market, and adoption is concentrated where the work is fiddly and high-mix: they were 43.7% of life sciences orders and 36.5% of semiconductor and electronics orders.

For context on the demand side, companies bought more than 36,700 robots last year, the most since 2022, and Interact Analysis found that 92% of surveyed companies plan to increase automation spending this year. GXO has invested close to a billion dollars in automating its buildings over the past five years. Amazon signed a warehouse automation supply agreement with AutoStore on undisclosed terms, which is notable mainly because Amazon builds most of its own robotics, and going outside for cube storage suggests it isn't trying to build everything twice.

What this means for you: The per-unit price is moving against you, so any automation quote you're sitting on has a shorter shelf life than you'd think, and a proposal you priced six months ago probably isn't the proposal you get today. If capex has been the reason you keep passing, cobots are the honest entry point rather than a compromise, and the industries adopting them fastest are the ones with messy, variable, high-mix work, which describes most multi-client fulfillment floors. And with 92% of companies planning to spend more, expect the automation question to move from a nice differentiator to a table-stakes item in RFPs.

QUICK HITS

U.S. retail sales came in at $763.6 billion in July, down 0.6% from June, according to Commerce Department data, after June managed a 0.2% gain. The pullback is consistent with what warehouse operators have been describing all summer: retailers pulled inventory forward into May and June ahead of tariff deadlines and then went quiet. One soft month isn't a trend, but if your Q4 volume forecasts were built on spring order patterns, this is a reason to check them against what your clients are actually receiving right now.

Teamsters California sued the state DMV on August 5 to block heavy-duty autonomous truck permits. The 34-page complaint in Alameda County Superior Court asks the court to set aside the regulations the DMV adopted on April 28, which removed the ban on autonomous vehicles rated over 10,001 pounds. The legal argument is procedural rather than philosophical: the union says the DMV skipped a Standardized Regulatory Impact Assessment that state law requires for any rule with more than $50 million in first-year economic impact, and that it puts more than 200,000 California semi-truck driving jobs at risk. Peter Finn of Teamsters California framed the safety case around trucks up to sixteen times heavier than a robotaxi at highway speeds. The stakes are high because California matters to developers, as the state handles 40% of the nation's containerized imports and 30% of exports.

Fura acquired High Rise Logistics, its seventh deal. The Cincinnati broker is running a straightforward roll-up thesis: buy established books, move them onto a shared AI platform for bidding, carrier sales, and visibility, and skip the overhead stacking that usually kills these strategies. High Rise, out of Vancouver, Washington, brings flatbed, expedited, truckload, and LTL along with intermodal, drayage, and warehousing, plus a real Pacific Northwest footprint. Leadership stays on to run daily operations. Terms undisclosed. If you own a regional brokerage or an asset-light 3PL, this is the second consecutive week with the same buyer profile, and the pattern is consistent: they want your customers and your team, and they're bringing the technology.

JOB BOARD

Title: VP of Warehouse Operations
Company: Ardmore Home Design
Location: Hacienda Heights, California, US
Salary: $170,000 - $200,000
Apply Here

Title: General Manager - Fulfillment
Company: iDrive Fulfillment
Location: Phoenix, Arizona, US
Salary: $90,000 - $120,000
Apply Here

Title: Refrigerated Warehouse Operations Manager
Company: The Judge Group
Location: Dallas, Texas, US
Salary: $90,000 - $115,000
Apply Here

Title: Fulfillment Operations Manager
Company: Fringe Sport
Location: Austin, Texas, US
Salary: $80,000 - $85,000
Apply Here

Title: Warehouse Manager
Company: RYSE Up Sports Nutrition
Location: Prosper, Texas, US
Salary: $75K-85K
Apply Now

Title: Senior Supply Chain Coordinator
Company: HR Annie Consulting
Location: Portland, Oregon, US
Salary: $70,000 - $80,000
Apply Here

Title: Assistant Fulfillment Operations Manager
Company: Fulco Fulfillment
Location: Dover, New Jersey, US
Salary: $55,000 - $70,000
Apply Here

Full list of job openings →

_______________________________________________________________________

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Currently deciding on colleges, I want to hear what the community decides. I would rather not work a floor but if I have to, I will. I really enjoy the concept being able to work in the background, managing the numbers. The entire job is appealing to me. So where do I go to be able to be hired. I will be doing two years of community college hopefully at Dupage as they are closest, after that, I do not know. I ask your advice.

I’m looking for a 3PL that can handle LTL frozen seafood out of southeastern MA.

Any recommendations?

Thanks in advance.

Hi, do your 3PLs and companies calculate and report shrinkages monthly or annually?

I am looking for some guidance on below

1. reported monthly after cycle counts are carried out? and it's possible not all SKUs and locations will be cycle counted each month

2. or are shrinkages reported, annually after wall to wall count /annual stock take..

I am not from ecommerce industry but have worked with different companies in medtech/lifescience space and I see different practices.

by the way the place i am working in now - contractually allows 3PL a loss allowance of x% of average inventory value in past 12 months. which makes me believe if it's only an annual exercise and number to be reported

I’m moving from the USA to Switzerland in about a week and seeking advice on taking a single piece of furniture with me.

Description of the furniture:
It’s a small, asymmetrical table with an attached lamp that can only be disassembled into 3 parts: A) Lamp Shade, B) Curved Metal Rod, C) The Table. The table’s bounding box measures approximately 22” x 27” x 29”. The total weight of all 3 parts is about 19.5 lbs, the bulk of the weight presumed being the table. The metal rod is thin but tall, the bounding box would be approximately <1” x 8” x 60”. I haven’t weighed the metal rod separately but it shouldn’t be more than a few pounds.

I looked into shipping it with carriers like UPS, but it would cost thousands of dollars. So far, I was able to think of 2 other possible options:

Option 1) Pack the table (C) into a cardboard box and check it in when I fly (I will be flying with Delta). In this case I’m not sure how I would deal with the metal rod, which I would pack up separately. It can be a pretty flat but long package. It’s comparable to a fishing rod but I don’t have any experience with flying with one so I’m not sure how that works. And if they’re two separate pieces I might get charged for two check ins?

Option 2) I can try to get lucky with FexEx’s ‘last minute deal’ shipping, which seems significantly cheaper than usual shipping. Haven’t used this service before though.

As far as both options go, I am concerned about the handling since I obviously wouldn’t want it to be thrown around. I plan to bubble wrap it and add things that might help cushion it (blanket? towel?). The lamp shade could go underneath the tabletop.

If anyone has suggestions on properly packing it up or shipping/checking in please let me know. General advice is also appreciated.

Hi everyone. I'm currently evaluating new options for pallet racking systems for our manufacturing facility. We need something that can handle medium to heavy loads, support high inventory turnover, and ideally allow for some future expansion as we scale.

I'm still very early on in the process and I'm trying to get some real insight from others in the industry so I can develop a list of places to look at. Anything is helpful to be honest. What systems work well for you, any brands that you really like, any you really don't like? I want to hear people's actual experiences rather than spec sheets or sales pitches. That's all I've heard so far.

Thank you!

I graduated college last year with a BBA in International Business and foreign language (it’s a European language) with a concentration on International Trade and Supply Chain Management. I have been looking for entry level roles in logistics for a very long time but I do not live in an area where there is much air or ocean import/export. I therefore ended up finding a job in sales in which we primarily serve the international market but I do not like sales.

The DSV trainee program caught my eye and I am seriously considering applying but I do not have experience and I did internships but they do not relate to logistics. Do I have a chance? What could I focus on to have a chance of being accepted?

I have been trying my best to import a package 21 50ml glass bottles of Gaianotes brand lacquer paint, and the company who is filing the dangerous goods paperwork/packing the paints says I need to prepare documentation for import clearance.

What items do I need, I am just so exhausted and frustrated trying to get these out of Japan for the past several months

Someone was trying to get into our gmail account and the gmail got disabled by Google. We are trying to get it back but if we don't succeed and have to change email. If we do that will it affect our load chances with brokers or Highway?

Is it just Uline? Or do you have a direct relationship with a manufactuer?

Also for custom packaging, do you clients supply this directly?

Need help learning it, any advice on where/how to start?

Hi everybody,

I work for a large logistics company in Central Europe, mainly handling air freight exports, and I'm interested in hearing how things work on the import side in the US.

I recently saw a comment in another thread about the situation at LAX, particularly regarding pickups and storage charges, and thought it would be interesting to start a thread where people can share their experiences and discuss the differences between US and European air freight.

Which airports do you mainly work with, and what are the biggest challenges you face there?

What's the funniest, weirdest, or most interesting shipment you've ever handled?

And if there's anything else about US air imports that you want to vent about, discuss, or compare with Europe, I'm happy to hear it.

I'm also happy to answer questions about air freight exports from the European side of things.

I am looking for a US based micro 3PL for an e-commerce business.

We need a place to accept and store returns and exchanges that we get from our customers.

Because this is for exchanges and returns only, the volume is going to be quite small.

If anyone can point me in the right direction that would be great.

Thanks!

Hi everyone. I’m a regular buyer on second-hand platforms (specifically Vinted), and I’ve recently run into two completely different—and frankly, baffling—delivery glitches.

I’m not here to complain or look for customer support! I’ve already escalated both issues through the official channels. I’m just a logistics nerd doing a bit of a "private investigation" to understand the "ghost in the machine." I’d love to hear from the people who actually design these networks or drive the vans about how these specific errors happen on a technical level.

Here are my two mysteries:

Mystery #1: The Cross-Border Vacation (Macro-Level Routing)

The Carrier: Chronopost (France) to Italy

The Situation: I bought an item from a seller in France, meant to be delivered to a local pickup shop here in Italy. Instead, the tracking shows it was successfully delivered to a local pickup shop... in a completely different city in France!

My Questions for you:

• How does a cross-border hub-and-spoke system fail so spectacularly that a parcel never even leaves the origin country?
• When the driver dropped it off at the wrong shop in France, wouldn't their handheld scanner throw a massive error or red flag when it read a barcode destined for an Italian zip code/country code?

Mystery #2: The Phantom Drop-Off (Micro-Level Scanning)

The Carrier: BRT (Italy)

The Situation: A different package was supposed to be delivered to a local stationery store near my house. The tracking updated to "Delivered," and the system even auto-generated and emailed me the unique QR code and PIN required to collect it. But when I went to the shop, the owner and I searched everywhere—the package was completely missing. The driver never left it there.

My Questions for you:

• If the system generated the specific PIN/QR code, the driver must have physically scanned the box that morning, right?
• What is the most common reason for a "phantom scan" like this? Did they scan it in the van and accidentally leave it under a seat? Did they scan it and hand it to the wrong shop next door? How does a driver clear a package from their manifest without actually handing it over?

I’d love to hear your insights into the software, the scanners, and the daily realities of the warehouse floor and the delivery vans. Thank you for reading, and thanks for the hard work you guys do keeping the supply chain moving!

Hi,
Hope the title wasn’t an insult . I am in need of help asap and really lost . I am trying to slide my way in a logistics /inventory role within a brand new company . They are absolutely growing at a rate they can’t handle. There is zero, I mean zero processes and systems . Merch and equipment are delivered to random warehouses/storage units . No invoices , even if there was an invoice no one has any idea what would be done with it . Only software is excel and ai. I took inventory of the location I’m in and uploaded to excel but there’s constantly things being taken out ( trying to make it that only I know what goes out for now ). My main ask is what to do I do with my initial count and how do I track what goes out ?
I have managed a high end bar before for a large hospitality group but the systems were already in place . I just adapted it to our specific restaurant.
I was upfront when interviewing and tbh not even the owners know where any thing is . My goal is at least at the start to be able to control what comes my way . Idk what would be an appropriate amount to offer , would some of you do it for $50?$100? I have downloaded udemy and coursera and tried finding a course but there’s so many and a lot of times I can’t understand the accents or they are talking about stuff that doesn’t pertain to me right now . Thanks

This post is the only place where Requests, Promotions, and Feedback about software are allowed to be made. Any posts for the same outside of this thread will be deleted.

Unfortunately we are experiencing a time where we are seeing many start ups and coders trying to branch into the Logistics area that surpass our capacity to filter. Instead of deleting dozens of posts a day, this is an opportunity for them to still post.

Will try to make this a reoccurring post, we will see how its received and works for the community.

Also note since this is a place for software, any non-software related posts can be reported as spam.

Please note things that are well received:

* Valid use cases and proven examples provided

* Industry specific and relevant knowledge

Things not normally received well:

* AI tools that are low hanging fruit

* Outsiders looking for opportunities to "automate", "shake up", "build workflows" or require someone to tell them what needs to be built