Practitioner analysis of parcel carrier pricing, contract structure, and the market dynamics shaping how shippers are billed. Written from four decades inside carrier and shipper operations.
Ask a carrier how it feels about pricing a third-party logistics provider and you will get a careful answer. Ask again after the second drink and you will get the real one: the 3PL is a reseller. It buys transportation...
Read the piece →Tusk Logistics surveyed six hundred US shipping professionals last month on seventeen alternative carriers, asking for each one whether they had used it and whether they would trust it with their business.
Read the piece →Everyone read the loss. USPS reported a net loss of $2.5 billion for the quarter ended June 30. It led every story.
Read the piece →Every year, a carrier hands you a hundred pages of research for free. The research is good. It is also working you. Both are true at the same time, and the shippers who get the most out of that report are the ones who...
Read the piece →Most shippers treat a carrier agreement like a lease. You sign it, you live in it, and you think about alternatives when it runs out.
Read the piece →Ask a shipper what it would cost to leave their primary carrier and most can give you a number. Ask where the number came from and the answer gets vague.
Read the piece →Your parcel spend climbed this quarter. Your rate card did not change. Both of those are true at the same time, and the reason is sitting in your pricing agreement.
Read the piece →Amazon Shipping is quietly undercutting FedEx, UPS, and even the Postal Service. The rate is real. The harder question is what you trade for it, and almost nobody is costing that out.
Read the piece →Businesses keep spending money where their customers are not, and skipping the places their customers already are. The gap between the two is where margin quietly lives, and most companies never see it.
Read the piece →Ask shoppers why they do not buy internationally. Then ask businesses why they do not sell internationally. You get almost the same list.
Read the piece →A bad delivery is not a logistics problem. It is a lost customer, and often the lifetime of purchases that customer would have made.
Read the piece →Peak season pricing lands in a matter of weeks. The per-package number will get all the attention, and it is the least important part of the announcement.
Read the piece →FedEx released its 2026 peak season demand surcharges on July 22. Most of the coverage led with the 23 percent jump on Ground Residential. That is the wrong number to be looking at.
Read the piece →The Postal Service filed its 2026 peak season surcharge on August 25. It runs October 4 through January 17, and it applies to Priority Mail Express, Priority Mail, Ground Advantage, and Parcel Select.
Read the piece →UPS published its 2026 demand surcharges on August 26, and the headline rates are modest. Ground Residential and Ground Saver go to 50 cents per package in the shoulder periods, 75 cents from November 22 through...
Read the piece →All three national carriers have now published their 2026 peak schedules. FedEx went first on July 22. USPS filed on August 25. UPS published on August 26. Thirty-five days from first to last, and all three seasons...
Read the piece →A few days ago I made the case that the peak surcharge is the one increase your contract was never built to stop. It sits outside your negotiated discounts, it scales against your own volume, and the agreement makes it...
Read the piece →Here is a peak planning point that gets overlooked: your holiday volume is a fixed number, but the days you have to move it are not.
Read the piece →It is still summer, and peak feels like someone else's problem. It is not. The freight starts building in weeks, and this year, more of the people who will run it are doing it for the first time.
Read the piece →Diesel is finally coming down. If you ship parcel, do not expect your fuel surcharge to follow it down, at least not at anything close to the speed it climbed. The national on-highway diesel average that the carrier...
Read the piece →In Part 1, I described the ratchet built into every ground fuel surcharge table: it climbs in small, fast steps when diesel rises, and gives ground in much larger, slower steps when diesel falls. Up fast, down slow, by...
Read the piece →In June I published a comparison of the two carriers' Ground fuel surcharges. On July 3 I updated it: FedEx had restructured, raising the floor while diesel fell, and the change would cost shippers nothing until fuel...
Read the piece →UniUni is reportedly in talks to go public on the Toronto Stock Exchange through a roughly $1 billion SPAC. Revenue grew from $113M in 2023 to $683M in 2025, with guidance for $1.5B in 2027 and $125M in pre-tax profit....
Read the piece →A couple weeks ago I wrote that the last mile has a structural floor of roughly two minutes per stop that density cannot compress, leaving challenger carriers chasing public-market margin with three levers: raise rates,...
Read the piece →On June 1, FedEx took the same structural step UPS took when it sold UPS Freight to TForce in 2021. It anchored the public company to parcel.
Read the piece →If you signed a FedEx Transportation Services Agreement in late 2024 or in 2025, the contract is doing something right now that nobody told you about.
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