Written by T. Bishop, Dispatch
If you ever stand near a dock door at a typical freight company, you will see something disheartening: trucks rolling out full and trucks rolling back empty. The economics of one-way freight are why so much reverse logistics — and especially used corrugated freight — never gets off the ground. An empty trailer is a guaranteed loss on diesel, time, and driver hours. So we do not allow them.
How the routing actually works.
Every morning at 5:30 a.m., before any driver shows up, our dispatcher pairs every outbound delivery with an inbound pickup that lives near the delivery zip. The two stops sit on the same route. The truck delivers, then drives the small distance to the pickup, loads up, and rolls home. On a typical Tuesday we run six routes, each with at least one delivery and one pickup. None of them deadhead.
When pairing breaks down.
Sometimes we cannot find a return load near a particular delivery zip. When that happens we have three options: delay the delivery by a day until a pickup comes available, route the truck to a more distant pickup that still pencils, or — very occasionally — partner with another LTL carrier and let the truck come home empty. The last option happens about 4% of the time, and we treat it as a failure mode worth tracking.
Why this is unusual.
Most freight networks do not run this way because their software is built around volume, not pairing. They optimize for the largest possible single load and then accept the deadhead as a cost of doing business. Our network is small enough that we can do the pairing manually, and our customer base — half of which is buying and half of which is selling — gives us a natural pool of complementary stops to draw from.
The numbers.
Last year our average loaded ratio (loaded miles / total miles) was 91%. Industry average for reverse logistics is closer to 60%. The 31-point difference is the entire reason our freight costs come out reasonable on a per-unit basis.