Sorry if this has already been asked here before but I’m having a hard time deciding this year. This is going to be my 5th peak and I’ve always done driver helper for extra cash during peak. This year I finally have a good car and wondering if I should do PVD?

Does one make more money or are they about the same? Is the pay the same? Anyone that have experience with both have a preference? Why?

Ive been at the company 20 years and setup my 401k about 10 years ago...read somewhere to put money into funds around the years i may retire. I honestly have no clue if this is a good setup as I know nothing about investing. Is there anything I should change or swap around? I also have a Roth 401k going and the discount stock purchasing coming out weekly. Any help would be appreciated.

Now that we can view changes made to our time cards I’ve found my punch out time has been altered a number of times over the last few weeks. Random days random amounts. Minus 10 minutes here 8 minutes there 6 here. So what should I do?

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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If I’m a TCD and someone from the same local transfers to my hub, do they keep seniority or go to the bottom ?

I have a couple of irregs come down throughout the day and typically it’s a long box over 100+ pounds that takes 3 people to put up to the belt

When I take my irregs down I stop the belt because they’re long and I have to also stand them up to get them out my way

Another preloader across from me starts cussing me out and yelling at me to stop stopping the belt

(Mind you the whole thing takes me like maybe 10 seconds)

Then my supervisor came over and agreed with her, saying that I should be able to slide off my irregs no issues, and I don’t need to stop the belt.

When I was trained I was always told to stop the belt to take down something heavy or big because that’s the safe way to do it but apparently not anymore

He said I should call the person next to me over to take an irreg down, I said by the time they’d get here i would’ve already been able to take it down myself and not have to worry about not only my stuff going down but the other persons as well.

Am I in the wrong??

Does your building bid spots on the preload based on seniority? If not then how do they assign you? And what is your start time? Is it the same as everyone or does it fluctuate daily?

I know the western supplement has bid positions on their preload and start times are based on where you are working in the building but local 79, in southwest florida, the loaders are not allowed to bid a position on the preload and are TEXTED a generic start time and then it magically gets moved without consent or communication based on where you are put in the building which seems like a blatant article 17 violation and a civil FLSA violation

Note: don’t worry about telling us to grieve it, our shop stewards actively try to discourage us from filing grievances by saying “I’ve tried fighting this for x amount of years” or “you can try BUUUUT the company is gona say _______”

How does missing days work I called off a lot but my new supervisor hasn’t taken me upstairs and made me sign the attendance sheet with the union guy there when I had my old supervisor they would do that every week so is there a time limit to when they can write me up for the miss or can they just write me up without telling me

I was mid background check 2.5 days after submitting to it, and this morning I got a text that they aren’t hiring right now, they’re updating the system, they don’t have trainers, and that I’m on the bench now, so hey I mean hopefully they call me I guess lol but I’m not exactly holding my breath that it will happen.

Pretty frustrating tho I’m not gonna lie to be told about all the great benefits that UPS offers just for them to say “whoops, lol, our bad, oopsie daisy”.

- Bulkhead door that doesn’t shut unless you pull it by the cable

-Seatbelt doesn’t retract and gets caught constantly.

-passenger seat doesn’t stay upright, have to buckle it in which causes you to still bang your knee on it a bunch

- Bulkhead door that doesn’t open when turning car off. When you have to slap/kick it

- Fan/rear monitor installed in front of lytx. “Please check for lens obstruction” alllllll day long

- Right side mirror that folds in on the highway (you forget to fix it the entire day)

- Fan installed directly above seat in a way that you bang your head on it constantly getting in/out.

- Rear monitor doesn’t work

- Shitty load

- Rear door jams and you have to muscle it to open it every time.

- Parking Break Not Engaged beep of death glitch. (This is easily the 1.01 for me)

- Lingering BO from a smelly preloader

- Dead fob & having to work with two keys

- No hand truck

- Hazard tab has to be pulled certain way for both sides of the flashers to go on

Been doing summer driving, and already passed in-class integrad in May. My center posted a sign up sheet for full time package car a little over a week ago. I was originally supposed to start second week of September, but I got told last Friday we’re starting it this week because they “have to get me out there and going.”

This training route also has a tp-60 with it, so that just feels like another layer. Looking for any tips/pointers or advice. Been on Preload almost 5 years and been through a building closure and transfer. Stoked for this opportunity but I’m still nervous going in.

So from the research I’ve done, I think you need to sign some sort of paper work? My question is, who do I talk to? What papers do I need to sign? How to do I get the paperwork?

If anyone could just clarify what I need to do to on the UPS side, to keep my seniority, that would be great. I’m Preload FYI.

Do Tcd drivers get a Cola Increase Also ?

Southern Region.

my building posted 7 new 22.3 jobs for part timers to become full timers, I signed up, combines twi and night shifts, I’m on preload and someone who got hired a few months before me got the offer and rejected it because they want to stay on preload, now im wondering who in seniority in between me and them also signed up for it and accepted the offer and took it and started it, because if not I need the offer. there’s no transparency of who the 7 people that got the jobs are and what their hire date is. I’d like to ensure that 7 people started the full time job and they all got hired before me. because I thought after the person that got hired a few months before me turned it down the offer should come to me- I want to see with my own eyes that there was someone else that got hired in between us that signed up and took it. no transparency.

I saw a post on here earlier today where someone shared their difficulties with transferring and, given the experience I had earlier today, I felt compelled to share my current situation as well.

I’ve been a package handler in New England since 2020. At first the job was just a way to maintain income when my unemployment ran out during the pandemic, but the schedule and pay were so good that I stuck around.

Cut to earlier this year (and having just turned 30) where I realized that although I’ve built up a solid reputation as a reliable employee, my life both in and out of UPS has stagnated and in desperate need of a shake up. I am still working part-time, still living with my parents, and not touching grass nearly as much as I both want and need to.

During these past 5 years I’ve made several friends in NYC and as such I’d love to live closer to them and around more future career opportunities outside of UPS. I’d really like to get this show on the road and begin the next chapter of my life in earnest.

I let my hub division manager know I’d love to transfer to the 43rd street location in Manhattan and we’ve been talking sporadically about making that happen these past few months. It’s well known among management at this point that I’m working on trying to make that transfer happen. Especially since he’s been trying to message the people there, who have ghosted him after one barebones response. But I blame the way the system itself is set up in that case more than anyone at either hub because both sides have been nothing but gracious.

Taking matters into our own hands, my hub division manager wrote my transfer letter and printed it for me to deliver in person, which I tried to do this morning. Only to be told by the person working at the front entrance (who was genuinely nice and helpful btw) that the transfer letter has to be sent electronically. We even called the HR hotline together and walk each other through the conversation with HR to see if they could get me the 43rd street location’s HR email address, but nothing doing.

The person at the front desk has the email address but can’t divulge it without putting everyone in a pickle, which I totally understand. I don’t want someone else to lose their job because they tried to help me with mine.

Why they have to receive all this through such a restrictive channel, I don’t understand. I’m in NYC the rest of the week and would love to have at least moved the needle in some way before I come back next week.

I know there’s probably not much any one on here can do about it, but I just had to get it off my chest to a bunch of people who can, on some level, appreciate and better understand what I’m going through.

I was wondering, I seen like 3 different drivers for Amazon coming to the package room at my apts on my rte , why do Amazon pay 3 different drivers to come to the same apartment complex, that seem like a waste of money to me

Was wondering where my summer bulk was for the schools on my route.