In early December, trucker Joe Rini learned that his own personal recession had just gotten worse.
One of his best clients called about a load of building materials that needed to travel to the Pacific Northwest, Northern California and Colorado -- normally a $4,400 job. Rini offered to do it for $3,400.
But before Rini's truck had arrived to pick up the load, the Cleveland-area customer of more than four years called back. Another trucker had offered to do the job for $400 less. Would Rini match it?
The answer, which was hard to spit out, was no.
"I didn't want to bid that low in the first place," said Rini, speaking from the road as he completed a trip from Ohio to California and Arizona and back to Ohio. "I start down that slope and I'm out of business."
This has been going on a lot lately. People willing to bid so low just to get anything in their trucks," Rini said. "Finding loads in the areas you need has become a hair-pulling experience."
There are few occupations that feel every jolt along the nation's economic highway as deeply as trucking does. Every fuel price surge, such as when diesel hit $5 a gallon last summer, is an immediate hit that can turn a profitable run into a money-loser. The average American might not notice an auto plant closing or business bankruptcy. For truckers, such events represent another loss of steady work. And with so many industries cutting back, 2008 will go down in modern trucking annals as the worst year ever.
After October -- which is normally the busiest month on the road for the holiday season -- turned out to be the worst October for hauling cargo by truck in five years, the American Trucking Assn. reported a slight rise in business in November.
But the trade group's chief economist, Bob Costello, warned that "the freight outlook remains bleak."
A total of 785 trucking companies with a combined fleet of about 39,000 trucks went out of business in the third quarter, bringing the number of company trucks idled in the first nine months of 2008 to more than 127,000, or 6.5% of the industry, reported Donald Broughton, trucking analyst and managing director of Avondale Partners.
"Never have more trucks been pulled off the road in a shorter period of time than in the first three quarters of this year," Broughton wrote in his third-quarter analysis of the trucking industry.
