[00:00:00] Lori Boyer: Welcome to Unboxing Logistics. I’m your host, Lori Boyer, and we have one of my favorite guests on the docket today. It’s our third time with Dr. Chris Caplice. He is such a fan favorite here at the Unboxing Logistics family. He always has the greatest insights, lets us know what’s going on, tells it to us as it is, and so I’m really thrilled to have him here in 2026 with all the craziness going on to kind of walk us through everything.
Chris, what, what have I missed about you?
[00:00:33] Chris Caplice: So I’m Chris. I’ve had wear two hats really for today. I’m up at MIT at their Massachusetts Institute of Technology, their Center for Transportation and Logistics. I’m the executive director there. I’ve been here for a little over 20 years. Got my PhD here back in the nineties.
But CTL up at MIT. Like I said, it’s been around for 50 years, and we work with shippers, carriers, manufacturers, retailers and try to drive innovation that we come up with into practice. We’re very much driven about changing and impacting the industry. In addition to what I do up here at MIT, at CTL. In addition to the freight lab that I also run up here, I’m also the chief scientist at a company called DAT Freight and Analytics.
And if anyone knows anything about trucking, DAT is the source for analytical data and analysis in the trucking in the freight industry.
[00:01:23] Lori Boyer: Absolutely. Chris does so much in this industry and I love having him on and getting his insights. Chris, before we dive fully into kind of how shipping strategies have been changing lately, I want to talk a little bit of kind of what we’re seeing with the geopolitical craziness in the world right now.
I feel like the freight market has generally been a little calmer. We saw a lot of chaos a few years ago. But with all the geopolitical disruptions going on, you know, Iran. Shipping risks around the Strait of Hormuz, all of that kind of stuff.
From where you sit, what, how do you feel like the state of the in industry is. Are, is it calmer? Are we gonna be entering volatility? What, what are your thoughts?
[00:02:09] Chris Caplice: Yeah, so the the, the truckload market, yeah. It’s constantly changing, right? You’re right, we saw extreme patterns during the pandemic from the spring of 2020 to the spring of 22. But since the spring or summer of 2022, the last three and a half years have been pretty flat.
You contract rates have been flat, spots been creeping back up. Spot’s always the canary in the coal mine for contract. But whenever you look at the market, the, the two big forces, and this is not new, is supply and demand. And so because the, the supply and demand are constantly shifting in this very volatile market, then you’re gonna see prices going up and prices going down on a regularish basis.
But it, it’s not like seasonality. And so, yes, we’re seeing some change, but if you look at what we, where we are right now, or even back in January 26, compare that to January 2025. It was almost the same place, but what happened in 2025, all the tariffs hit and that caused so much uncertainty. The market kind of cratered ’cause it was correcting, we were seeing spot in contract, you know, increasing and the tight market is when spot is above contract and it’s soft when it spots below contract.
And we saw that happening. The tariffs just changed that and froze that. So we kind of, again, retrenched for last year in 2025, 26, that’s not happening as much. Companies are much more comfortable with the idea of the tariffs and realizing that it’s more negotiating a lot of times. So that kind of has been absorbed.
But what we are seeing is that supply is changing dramatically. A lot of the regulations that have come recently the English Language proficiency tests, the non domicile shutting down the CDL mills, all good things, to be honest, to get there’s a kind of a hole in the system. That’s increasing the cost of being a carrier.
So it’s reducing the, it’s increasing rather the barrier of entry. So it’s kind of constricting some of the supply of carriers. What does that mean? It’s not uniform across the whole United States. It’s happening in pockets, mainly in agriculture and produce. And we’re gonna see this more as produce season kicks off.
But we’re seeing a contraction of the, of the supply a little bit. Demand, you know, it’s mixed signals. It’s not, not dramatically increasing like we saw in the pandemic. So we are seeing some tightening. And we are gonna see a tightening of the market throughout 2026. Some people are saying the spot market’s gonna go up double digits, 20, 30% compared to where they were.
I’m a little more in line to low double digits, like 10 to 15%. I think that’s happening. The other thing that’s gonna impact that now that you alluded to that just happened in the last two weeks is fuel. So the impact of all the things happening in in the Middle East right now is that we’re seeing that the price of fuel, it topped a hundred dollars a barrel and probably is gonna be bouncing around there, maybe going up.
So that’s gonna have a disproportionate effect on supply as well. It’s gonna impact the smaller carriers on the spot market much more heavily than the large enterprise carriers in contract markets, ’cause those guys already have fuel surcharge programs that share the risk already and kind of moderates that.
The spot market, it’s usually an all in rate and they’re gonna get caught short, especially with a sharp rise. So that was a long winded answer to say yes, the market’s getting more volatile, it’s starting to tighten up and we’ll see the, what’s gonna happen over the next several months.
[00:05:40] Lori Boyer: So, Chris, I know we have some agriculture viewers and, and listeners here. So talk to me a little bit about that. You mentioned them specifically. Are there reasons that they are struggling more or what can they expect as we are coming up on that season?
[00:05:52] Chris Caplice: So, if you look at certain markets especially coming outta California, they have a very, very high percentage of, of carriers or drivers that are immigrants and they are more subject to these regulations that we just mentioned. And so we’re seeing a lot of the coming out of Southern California and coming outta the northwest. Spot rates are increasing because a lot of the capacity is, is being withdrawn. The other thing’s coming out, and maybe it’s not as much anymore.
There’s some hesitancy from some drivers to go to certain areas because of ICE. You know, then maybe they, they just, the, the risk of it, the, the perception of the risk of being deported is is high. And so there are some anecdotal evidence that we have that some drivers are hesitant to going to certain areas. If you do that, that reduces the supply and it might increase the, the spot rates.
[00:06:42] Lori Boyer: Okay. So given that, I guess let’s talk shippers, do we feel like maybe they are still relying too heavily on the spot market? Are they focusing on lowest cost? Like what, what is the state of the shippers right now? How are they responding to all of this kind of chaos?
[00:06:59] Chris Caplice: Yeah. Shippers have always, I mean, cost is always the number one objective.
We’re, I mean, from a shipper’s perspective, transportation is a cost center. It, it just is. And so you can use very strategically to be, do strategic advantage, but the actual thing, you, you try to drive the cost down. However not at all, all costs. And so I think shippers over the last several years have become much more sophisticated at balancing that because the most the, the lowest cost solution is usually the most fragile solution. And so you have to look and see what you wanna protect for.
And so we’re seeing the shippers are being much more cognizant of using low cost, and it’s not necessarily spot. Spot makes a ton of sense for, for use. In fact, one of the biggest mistakes that some shippers make is they try to use contract rates for everything, and it just doesn’t make sense for certain lanes that are sporadic, low volume, things like that.
[00:07:56] Lori Boyer: I’ve heard you mention, and you know, I follow you, the importance of kind of carrier stability. Like we’ve had a huge focus, as you said, it’s always cost. Cost is a big deal. I was just reading a study recently that in 2026, companies are taking on more of the costs of the tariffs and everything than they did in 2025.
So cost is even a bigger deal for them right now. So what is stability? I mean, we’re, I guess when we’re talking those lowest cost carriers. If there are some stability issues, tell, tell the audience what, what it is you’ve been saying about carriers.
[00:08:30] Chris Caplice: I, I think of in terms of consistency, right? Every carrier wants to have consistent volume and they want to have a consistent customer base. And shippers want to have consistency as far as the, the carrier’s going. So people, we like status quo. We don’t, no one likes to see the carrier base change every year, every six months. So you want that consistency ’cause they know the business. It’s more than just changing a name on a spreadsheet, right?
It’s actually the driver and the knowing where to go knowing the systems. So there’s, there’s a value to incumbency and so whenever a ship does a bid, right? They always have a dial that they want to do to say, well, how much am I willing to pay above the very lowest cost? Because if you run a bid and you have a bunch of carriers submit, you can always look and say, what is the absolute lowest if I take the lowest bid in every lane?
You look at that and you never wanna tell anyone that number. But then to make it a more business optimal, you’re gonna say, well, this incumbent, yeah, they’re 3 cents more a mile over the lowest cost, but that’s worth it. So now I’m giving back. Right? And so, in times when the market is really soft, they might go the other way.
They might try to go the, the very lowest cost and look for reductions from the previous rates they’d been hauling. In markets that’s tightening, they might want to give back ’cause they want to keep those carriers interested. So what we’re seeing now, instead of trying to ratchet down and save every penny, we’re seeing that shippers are giving back 3, 5%.
And they’re doing that to make sure that those, those carriers stay with them and they don’t have to renegotiate them when the market gets even tighter. So there’s different ways that, that shippers will do this. They might say, I’ll give you an X percent increase and I won’t put that lane in the bid for you.
So that you kind of let the incumbents they opt out of the, the bid, or you can, there are other ways that you can do that. But both shipper and carrier want consistency. They want to have reliability of both the volume and of the capacity.
[00:10:32] Lori Boyer: There has to be a little bit of a mix I would think too though, in terms of risk management. Like I was just talking to somebody recently who said they have, they always just use a single carrier, right? Because of maybe that comfort level of like, I know them, I know what’s gonna happen. But to me that that creates a diversification risk if in this crazy world something happens. So how do you balance that, I guess?
[00:10:52] Chris Caplice: I, I don’t know any shipper that uses a single carrier for their entire network.
Maybe for a lane, you might do a primary for that. But the, the beautiful thing that shippers do, and I think this makes sense, is you always wanna look for new carriers coming in. Always. And so the way that a shipper will look at the procuring of their network, they, they might have an annual RFP, that’s the big bid, right?
All lanes they go to a bunch of carriers and they spend a lot of time analyzing it. But things happen throughout the year. Facilities come and go. They get turned online. New customers you know, some lanes fail with carriers, so there’s always corrections needing to be done to the routing guide.
And so those mini bids that happen, a lot of shippers will do them monthly. You know, they’re kind of like catch up bids, and the, the focus there is on speed. Let’s get some rates in. So that’s the best place to introduce new carriers. You have new carriers who have been knocking on your door, they’ve been calling you saying, you know what, let’s, let’s maybe give you some business on this mini bid. And test out might give them half a dozen lanes, see how they do. And they, they earn their way into the larger bid. So I agree, you shouldn’t just use the carriers you’ve been using all the time. You, you want to introduce some new blood. But do that in a very controlled way.
You don’t just suddenly switch to this new carrier you haven’t used before, ’cause then you get into the winner’s curse. You don’t know. You know, right now you have the devil you know. You don’t know that other devil.
[00:12:19] Lori Boyer: That’s so true. So do you have any recommendations for, I know I hear from a lot of people, you know, you mentioned reliability specifically that people are looking for.
Are there specific things when they are kind of vetting some of these newer carriers that you would recommend, you know, red flags or green flags in terms of reliability?
[00:12:36] Chris Caplice: So, so when I, when I was talking about reliability and, and you know, consistency, that’s kind of consistency of business, right? For regular evaluating the carrier, it’s whatever KPIs they’re constantly looking at. It’s the acceptance for, for truckload, it’s carrier acceptance. Do they accept the load? You know, damage, on time, all the, all the standard things you wanna look for.
I think that’s why it’s best to test them out in a small sample and so see how they do. And then you continue to grow their, their business. ’cause they earn, they earn their right to handle more of your business. ‘Cause the big threat for these contracts you have is they’re, they’re not binding in terms of penalties or anything like that, but it’s the future business.
So them doing better earns them the right to get more, more business. That, that’s generally how I see most shippers look at it.
[00:13:27] Lori Boyer: Okay. Love that. Love that. They need to earn the right to get more of your business. Fantastic. I love that. So as we’re talking about finance and cost, a lot of times people want to go maybe with not the lowest cost because the risk, but it’s not always easy to sell to your finance team.
Do you have tips or recommendations on that?
[00:13:53] Chris Caplice: Yeah. This is one of the big things that we do at DAT. We, we constantly trying to arm the transportation executive with the right tools and the right message to make sure that the CFO and the CPO, the chief purchasing or finance officer understands why they’re making that trade off.
And the most important concept is that transportation pricing, especially truckload transportation, it’s all relative. You know, you gotta see how you’re doing compared to the market. Because the market, like we said, is constantly changing. If you go back 10, 15 years, you can see the cycles come generally in 30 to 48 months increments. Not exactly each time.
And so what really matters is, how am I doing relative to the market? Am I below the wave or am I above the wave? And so to do that, to see where the market is, it’s critical that you have good information and good data. And there’s so much, the, the amazing thing that’s happened over the last 20 years, they’re the source of data that’s out there is incredible.
Not all of it is good. Not all data is created equal, right? And so that’s why what we do at DAT, we only use invoice data and you know, we have actual data out there and we use that to see where the market is going and use that as a compare something you can compare to for how you’re doing.
And so, the way that we like to recommend for transportation executives is compare yourself to the market. And every shipper will be above the market in some lanes and below the market in some lanes because you have different characteristics. If I’m shipping just paper products, right, and I don’t care if it’s the same week that it gets delivered, on time’s not as critical, I will probably be willing to spend less money, right?
I, I don’t care. But if I needed to be on time with a one hour window, I’m probably gonna have to pay more. So if we can compare to the benchmark and you can explain why am I above or why am I below? And that helps you explain to your CFO why you’re using a certain carrier.
And so it, it really is more than just what you’re spending. It’s how that compares to the market, which data is critical, but then explaining the differential why and because what you wanna do for the market, you want to see what the general market is, and you’re gonna be either below it or above it and be able to explain each of those.
[00:16:14] Lori Boyer: Now, absolutely. I love. Good data leads to good decisions. I think that, so critical. And we do, as you said, Chris, there is so much good data. I, 20 years ago, it was hard sometimes to figure that out, but there are those benchmarks. You should be doing the research, you should be finding out where you lie. And honestly, finance teams, that’s all.
They love the data.
[00:16:37] Chris Caplice: The other thing that something comes out from finance, there’s a couple things. First. Procurement guys think that economies of scale dominate, and, you know, if I buy more, I should be paying less per unit. And, and the, the hard lesson for CFOs and CPOs dealing with truckload transportation for the first time is that that is not the case.
In fact, the larger shippers, the larger buyers of of truckload transportation spend more per mile. Right. You know, they then, then a smaller buy because your network gets more dispersed and you have lanes that are not as high volume. So the, there are no economies of scale to truckload transportation procurement.
That’s lesson one. The second lesson is that a lot of CPOs will wanna put a contract in place on every lane, and that’s called the coverage strategy. Because then you, you, you have a sense of your budget and what you’re gonna spend, but anyone who’s been in this industry long enough knows that putting a contract rate on a lane that you have two loads per year.
It’s worthless. It’s not worth the time you spent or the paper that it’s printed on because it probably won’t come to fruition, that the carrier probably won’t have a truck there that specific week that you need it. So that’s where it comes back to a point you made earlier, the use of spot. We’re finding that carriers, shippers rather are much more Strategic in how they use spot, and they should be. So if you, you look at the amount of, of lanes that you have, the, the lanes you have are probably like 30 to 40% of your lanes will handle 80% of your volume. But the other lanes, the 60, 70% will handle just like 15 to 20%. So those ones you don’t wanna put contract rates on.
You wanna have some kind of dynamic pricing or low volume strategy, and there’s different ways you can do that. But one of the pushes that you have to guard against is the CFO or the CPO might want to contract for everything, ’cause they think that’s like, it’s like Linus’s blanket, it makes them feel better.
But in fact it, it causes more problems than it create more problems that it fixes.
[00:18:39] Lori Boyer: But it’s okay to have contracts for the big lanes.
[00:18:41] Chris Caplice: Yes.
[00:18:42] Lori Boyer: And you know where the, your 60% of your stuff’s going through. Just those other ones, it doesn’t make a lot of sense.
[00:18:47] Chris Caplice: Yeah. The vast, vast majority of your volume will go under contract.
The vast majority of your lanes will probably be spot.
[00:18:55] Lori Boyer: Okay. Yeah, that makes sense. Are there any signals or signs that you would say it’s time for a shipper maybe to be revisiting some things, to be looking for new carriers, to be, you know, expanding or, or contracting as well?
[00:19:09] Chris Caplice: Yeah, always. So you want to use that, those benchmarks that we talked about.
So having good quality market benchmarks, ’cause the market shifts. Right. And every carrier’s network shifts. Their economics change as they get new customers and shed other customers, ’cause then the dynamics of their network changes. Because in truckload trucking it’s all economies of scope. In other words, the cost of me going from A to B is really a function of how am I getting to A and what am I doing after I get to B, right?
If I have a round out and back, you know, the holy grail of a truckload transportation, that changes my, what I can charge on that, that forehaul lane. What I do in the back haul influences my forehaul. So because of that, the market’s constantly changing, not just on a macro level, but also on lane by lane level.
So always be looking how I’m comparing to that benchmark. And if it gets the gap gets too big and you can’t explain it due to service requirements or other things, then that’s a time to revisit, whether it’s a direct conversation with a carrier there or a mini bid or some other action.
[00:20:12] Lori Boyer: So how often, if you were gonna give it a timeframe, I know we say everything’s always changing, but for some people that’s like, okay, once a year I’m gonna look.
And some people are like, every hour I’m checking, you know, where is the line? Do you have recommendations of how often they should be keeping an eye?
[00:20:25] Chris Caplice: Yeah. And so I think it is, it’s a great question, Lori. And so I think you have different drum beats of things you do every day, every week, every month, every quarter.
So every day you just kind of. Look at the real problem lanes, right? Did something just out of whack. And it’s mainly looking at on time, those kind of things. I think a weekly cadence is good for just seeing if some carriers are getting out of whack, just the high level, but monthly carrier meetings. I think that makes sense at touch base and look at them over the course of a month, that’s a better snapshot.
And that’s when you can run mini bids or you might even wanna push those to a quarterly drumbeat, but I think you wanna have a series of escalating metrics and, and, and checkpoints at the daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly levels.
[00:21:10] Lori Boyer: I so agree. I’m that kind of person I need to put in, put it in my calendar, make sure I’ve got it scheduled, or you will forget. And pretty soon you look back and you’ve got all kinds of problems popping up, so.
[00:21:21] Chris Caplice: Yeah. And so what we, what we found that works really well at DAT is every Monday we ship an email comes you automatically from the data you have with us. That kind of gives you a snapshot of, of what you, where you stand in the market. It’s a good way to say, okay, where should I focus on? Are there lanes that I need to be really worried about?
What’s under control? It helps you focus so you can manage by exception.
[00:21:43] Lori Boyer: Yeah. Love that. Love that. Okay, I’m gonna get some of the questions that people have submitted, but first I wanna ask, is there anything that you see shippers doing that you’re just like, please stop, don’t do this. Don’t you know? What is a mistake that you would just recommend people stop doing?
[00:21:58] Chris Caplice: Well, one is that we’ve, or we, I’ve been saying the last couple minutes, is don’t try to put a contract rate on every lane. It’s a waste of time. And we’ve shown up at MIT some analysis I’ve done with my colleague, Dr. Angie, Achocella is to show that if you have, you, you put a contract rate on a lane that you do in your bid and a carrier wins it, right?
You set up the contract the probability that it doesn’t show up at all is very high. And that we call that ghost lanes or ghost freight. And we found in some shippers that can be as high as 50 to 60% of the lanes they put out to bid. And we found that by doing that, not only does it waste everyone’s time but it leads to higher rates from that carrier that you ghosted next year. And it’s almost a one to 2% difference in how their rates will be. They submit next year. So it not only wastes time, which is critical, it leads to negative effects. So don’t try to set up a contract for everything.
[00:22:55] Lori Boyer: Wow, that was crazy. 50, 60%. It was unexpected.
[00:22:59] Chris Caplice: But now it’s very low volume because the idea is don’t put a contract out on anything that didn’t have at least, I don’t know, 26 to to 50 loads.
If it had like 3, 4, 5, it’s not worth it. Have a mechanism, whether it’s APIs or set a core of carriers that you give those late, those lanes to have a different mechanism than a routing guide contract that falls a a, a waterfall method.
[00:23:26] Lori Boyer: Okay. I love that, and I love that you gave numbers because it kind of ties into my first question.
How do you find the balance between committed capacity and the spot market? You’ve been talking about that a lot, but is there anything, I love how you said, what was it, 26 to 50? Do you have any numbers kind of where people can use as a benchmark?
[00:23:42] Chris Caplice: When you say committed, I, I assume what you mean is a contract.
[00:23:45] Lori Boyer: A contract, yes.
[00:23:47] Chris Caplice: ‘Cause it’s, ’cause truckload contracts have always historically been very strange. Right? They’re binding in price, but they’re not binding in guaranteed volume that the shipper will provide or capacity that the carrier will provide. That’s why it’s the only commodity that I know of where breaching the contract is actually a KPI.
Right. A carrier acceptance ratio. It’s kind of weird and, and most shippers don’t even track the yield. In other words, they said in the bid, oh, it’s, it’s five loads a week, when in fact it ends up some weeks, one, some weeks, 20. The carriers are very cognizant of that. They manage that, but the binding, the commitment very few contracts commit the shipper to provide volume and commit the carrier to handle every single load. Because then the price to do that, the level of co cost to due to minimize that risk would be too high. So there’s always a little give and take on a contract. And what I’ve seen is most shippers will do a 26, like every other week kind of thing.
A load. They think that’s sufficient for contract. If you talk to carriers, they’ll say 50, they’ll say at least a load a week. Right? And so in between that is something reasonable.
[00:24:59] Lori Boyer: That’s the hotspot. Okay. My next question was, is there a metric, the, you know, you would recommend transportation teams are specifically paying attention to.
[00:25:09] Chris Caplice: Yeah. So they can always look at the metrics of their own operations, right. On time acceptance ratio, damage, all, all that kind of stuff that they have control of. But there are two metrics that we do at DAT that I think are worth looking at. One is the ship spot premium ratio and the other is the new rate differential.
The spot premium ratio looks at all the data from the several hundred shippers data that we have, the billions of dollars of, of data that we have, and we look at how the spot rate is compared to the contract rate. If that number is positive, then that means spot is higher than contract, where we’re in a tighter market.
If it’s negative then that means we’re in, in a, in a softer market. And what we’ve seen is the spot premium ratio has been negative for the last 36 months. And, and you know, during the pandemic it was super high, right? ‘Cause spot was way out, out, outpacing contract. It’s now cresting again and it flipped positive about two months ago.
And we weren’t sure whether it was the holidays in December or whether it was the, the weather. But for whatever reason, spot premium ratio gives an indicator of how the market is trending. It flipped positive in end of December and stayed positive through, through into now early March. So spot premium ratio.
The other one is new rate differential. And for that we look at the new rates coming in for contract and compare that to the old rates they’re replacing. And so again, if that’s positive, right, then that’s telling me that new rates are coming in higher than the old rates. If it’s negative, it’s just the opposite.
And we saw it in the last three, six months, new rate differential was negative. In other words, all the shippers were recouping some of those costs that they were paying out. During the pandemic. That’s flipped, and the new rate differential has been positive now for the last couple months. And that tells me what new contract rates are doing. The market is tightening. And this is the indicator that shippers will use to say, should I give back some money on my RFP or should I ratchet it down and try to save every penny?
This kind of tells you what you’re probably gonna expect. And again, the new rate differential is an average, so you’re gonna have some lanes if you’re in a bid where you’re gonna save a boatload of money. And you’re gonna lose some money or have to pay a little more. It’s all because the underlying network economics keep changing.
[00:27:26] Lori Boyer: So, do we anticipate that we’re gonna keep seeing these positive differentials?
[00:27:30] Chris Caplice: I the market is tightening, so, yes. I, I, my estimates have been that the for drive in, it’s gonna increase about 10% year over year over the course of 26. Spot a little more than that, but contracts gonna start increasing too. Now, this might change even more. Let’s see how the fuel situation goes. Is this a blip for this or is that gonna continue? ‘Cause again, that’s, that will definitely drive the cost up. And the other thing it will do will reduce the, the carrier base because the smaller carriers, especially those operating spot, can’t operate long.
‘Cause you think about it, they’re paying for their fuel now and they get paid for some surcharge 30, 60, 90 days later. So it becomes a cash flow issue. So that means they’re gonna do more factoring, which means they make lower margins, which is gonna drive some of those carriers at the edge outta business.
So higher price fuel has a disproportionate impact on smaller carriers than larger carriers. In fact, if you’re a large carrier with really efficient equipment and most of your business is on a fuel surcharge program, you actually can make money off your fuel surcharge program because if the fuel surcharge program assumes six miles per gallon fuel efficiency, and you’re at seven, then that differential, you’re actually on the, on the good side of the fuel surcharge program.
[00:28:49] Lori Boyer: Okay. So everybody should be kind of keeping a close eye on your smaller carriers.
[00:28:53] Chris Caplice: Absolutely.
[00:28:53] Lori Boyer: So for rising prices in, in gas. That’s huge tip there. One final question, which is, so a common kind of question.
Is there something, if you were gonna recommend doing something or making a change, are there things that make the fastest improvement, the best, ROI, you know. How can I get money fastest or, or see success fastest I should say.
[00:29:17] Chris Caplice: For, from a shipper’s perspective?
[00:29:18] Lori Boyer: Yeah, from a shipper’s perspective.
[00:29:19] Chris Caplice: I think the real concern is locking up your capacity and being ready to weather the storm. ‘Cause more tariffs are coming. We’re seeing the, you know, there’s a lot of uncertainty right now. There, there’s been a lot, but it’s, it’s increasing now and the market’s tighter. As you get to equilibrium, the slightest change could have a big impact. When you have a lot of like last, go back 24 months, big impacts, you know, big changes wouldn’t have much of an impact.
There’s so much excess capacity out there. It’s tighter now. So little things can have big ripple effects. So I think the big concern now is not Saving every dime. It’s more about, okay, will my carriers be there when the market gets tighter or if my demand shifts or if you know the fuel price increases. So I think it’s more keeping your capacity secure, more than saving, doing anything for a penny.
[00:30:11] Lori Boyer: Hmm. Okay. And I have one final question. This one’s just for me. I recently read an article that said that shippers are worried more, are worried less about speed than they once were. And, and are worried more about reliability and cost. Are you seeing that this is simply, I I was curious to hear what you thought.
‘Cause I read that, I think it was a article.
[00:30:30] Chris Caplice: Yeah, I think I, I, I think I saw that article. It’s more about you know, everyone’s saying that the way that Amazon’s been conditioning us, you know, same week, same day, next day, now it’s same day. I think it depends on the item that you’re looking for. And so it’s very dependent on the commodity and the industry.
Speed still matters a lot in retail, right? For that and especially for higher value items speed’s not as important for lower value things, right? It’s a time value of money. And so I think it really depends on the industry you’re in and that the things that you’re shipping. But yeah, I think generally consumers, I think the article I read are willing to accept slower.
We did a study up here at MIT that looked at seeing if, how willing consumers would be to have slower delivery, knowing that it would save a certain number of trees better for the environment. We found that they actually would be willing to do that. It’s the green button experiment that we did up here.
My colleague Dr. Velazquez, and so they found that some consumers are willing to accept lower, not just for lower cost but actually for, for other reasons. And so maybe there is a more, we’re not as hung up on getting something the same day. I don’t know. We’ll see how that pans out.
[00:31:51] Lori Boyer: Yeah, that’s really interesting.
And I would just say for everyone, it’s just nuanced. What is your industry? What are you shipping? Whatever, you know, who are your customers? Make some, do some tests and see. Like, like Chris said, maybe people would be willing to take it longer for saving a tree or for anything else.
Yeah. Always test. Okay. We are so out of time, Chris, but do you have any final thoughts or advice for everyone hanging in there in this kind of crazy time of transportation and supply chain out there?
[00:32:25] Chris Caplice: I just get to know your carriers I think we’re seeing a little bit of a shift, you know, the between brokerage asset and non-asset, you probably wanna shift a little more to more asset based at this point. Just because they have more stability. They, they have assets that they can actually move. But don’t go a hundred percent. So my big advice for you is to make sure you have the right balance in your portfolio of your carriers, that you have your transportation providers.
[00:32:50] Lori Boyer: Fantastic. And if they wanna get ahold of you or if they’re interested in DAT, what, what can they do?
[00:32:55] Chris Caplice: They can reach out to me directly at my email caplice@mit.edu or chris.caplice@dat.com. Either way.
[00:33:04] Lori Boyer: Awesome. Great insight. Lots of benchmarks and data and all that good data that leads to good decisions we talked about. So.
[00:33:12] Chris Caplice: Alright, great talking with you, Lori.
[00:33:13] Lori Boyer: And we will see everyone next time.
[00:33:16] Chris Caplice: Take care.
