Back to the Future

How It Was…and Could Be

In the spirit of the holiday season (well, sort of), we take you back to this time four years ago:

The 2019 year-end roundup of events in our trucking industry projected a fairly robust scenario. As Jim Stinson of Transport Topics summarized it: “If 2018 was one big party for the trucking and freight business, 2019 was the day after the party.”

Stinson described the familiar pattern in the industry: “fleets continued to take on capacity despite slowing freight growth and rising economic uncertainty.” Some of that capacity was borne by adjustment. By Q3, nearly 800 trucking companies had shuttered or gone bankrupt, more than twice the number that did so in 2018.

Demand didn’t change because of reduced availability. Existing companies added to their fleets in order to provide available and reliable supply; Class 8 truck sales reached a record high in September of 2018.

The price of diesel fuel was $3.049 a gallon at the end of December, 11 cents lower than the same time a year before.

The U.S.-China tariff war had the economy on edge, making it even more difficult to gauge the supply-and-demand balance that allowed companies to have steady flow of inventory.

That said, eCommerce was robust, and that created even more demand for final-mile delivery. Transportation companies adjusted and added to their ability to reach not just the warehouse but, increasingly, to our front doors.

The through line of business for, oh, only a couple thousand years or so: economic uncertainty. Trade wars, actual wars, manufacturing capacity, consumer demand, and product and delivery innovations all contribute to that uncertainty. Economists prognosticate, and a number of them gather enough past performance indicators to speculate to the point of being in the general ballpark without guaranteeing future results.

As for 2019, that economic uncertainty didn’t cancel the relative success of business throughout the country. What could possibly go wrong?

From the CDC Timeline: “December 12, 2019 • A cluster of patients in China’s Hubei Province, in the city of Wuhan, begin to experience the symptoms of an atypical pneumonia-like illness that does not respond well to standard treatments.”

And then it was 2020.