High fuel costs are putting the hurt on a lot of industries right now. But no where is the pinch more intense than for truckers, both independent operators and fleets.These are tough times for truckers. If you know someone who drives a rig, you've probably already learned what it costs to fill 'er up these days. $800 - $1000 is typical. Problem is, the truckers deliver goods for businesses that may schedule payments for thirty, sixty or even ninety days out. An active trucker may accumulate 10-15,000 dollars of expenses for fuel alone in a month, and that kind of out-of-pocket risk for owner operators is serious money.
We take our truckers for granted, no question about it. How often when fueling your car do you note that a trucker brought the fuel to that gas station? When you buy food at the grocery store, how many times have you thanked the truckers for bringing the food from wherever it was grown, packaged, delivered? But right now, due to high fuel costs, independent truckers and in a lot of pain. And at some point many will leave their trucks in the driveway.
The current transport systems that have worked for the whole of our various lives are in jeopardy. Truckers play a significant role in our society, and most of us are not aware of how much they're suffering at the moment.
I grew up in Maple Heights, Ohio, till I was twelve. One of the memorable television commercials I remember from my childhood was a Lawson's spot which showed a truck zipping along the highway with the tune, "Roll On Big O... Get that milk up to Lawson's in forty hours." I'm not sure where it was coming from, but the idea was that the milk was being transported fast and fresh. I used to go to Lawson's with my dad when he picked up milk, and always associated it with that Lawson’s jingle (among other things.)
There are truck strikes in Europe right now. Fuel prices are killing the transporters and in several countries -- Spain, France, Portugal – trucks are being parked in front of toll booths to give a visual show of what’s coming. The unions from Italy, England and other E.U. nations are meeting now to discuss more coordinated actions designed to effectively send a message.
At this moment I know no self-sufficient individuals personally. That is, people who grow their food, make their own goods, take care of all their personal business with no dependence on others. We’re not an agricultural society any more. We are dependent on grocery stores and when the store shelves are bare, how will people react? At some point something’s gonna give.
On another note, purportedly we have enough oil reserves within our borders to be utterly independent of foreign oil. It's a mystery to my why our leaders have allowed the country to come to its knees like this...
High fuel costs are going to impact us in ways we did not expect. Today’s blog is a warning signal. And a reminder to thank a trucker today.
>>>>>>>>>>>>But right now, due to high fuel costs, independent truckers and in a lot of pain. And at some point many will leave their trucks in the driveway.
ReplyDeleteI basically left my truck in MY driveway about 10 years ago, because with NAFTA and NERCC, family-raised vegetable prices in Duluth were below the cost of production.
Your neighbors, who used to make their living hauling dirt and gravel out of their family-owned pits, left their trucks in their driveway about the same time I did.
Not enough people were thanking their truckers, we got more complaints about our funky-looking trucks than we got any money, so we parked those trucks, eh?
To quote Johnny Cash on his San Quentin Prison album, "I work good under pressure. Put the screws on me, though, and I'm gonna screw right from under ya."
During that fresh post-NAFTA period of the late 1990's, just about everyone in the US preferred to have things produced, hauled, and delivered by the big-time-operators, who were "more efficient", and helped keep prices "Walmart-low". They drove newer, shinier trucks, too, with uniform logos, which made the highways look so much nicer for democracy.
The big boys could bring you, for example, cheap Diamond brand tools made in China, at less than half the price that Diamond tools made in Duluth used to be sold for.
(The same cheap, imitation Diamond tools are sold here in the Lao PDR, by the way, for about 1/10 that price -- so if you think Walmart is doing you any favors with their "low low prices", think again.)
Nevertheless, all those cheap prices were a lot of fun, for those in the US who still had jobs, for quite a while.
But then the energy boys took over the US government. They figured out all kinds of ways to jack up fuel prices, Enron just being the first.
The oil companies and their beneficiaries are making record profits, which is a good thing for them ... but LOTS of truckers (and other industries) are hurting now, not just a few. It's not just the market-gardeners and local gravel-haulers, anymore, who are being told they're inefficient, probably drink too much, and are lazy, besides.
You said, "High fuel costs are going to impact us in ways we did not expect."
As a matter of fact, I did expect that. I did predict it more than four years ago, as the US was miring itself in Iraq, that rising fuel prices are going to affect everything ; including the price of food, the price of heating a home, the price of rent, the price of clothing ... you name it. (Gee, even the last Levi Strauss plant in the US closed down in January 2004. I noticed that at the time, and commented about it to many people, that it did not bide well for the US economy.)
It seems that the US is maybe starting to realize it shouldn't have outsourced its production to Mexico, China, and other places so far away from the homeland, where it costs so much to transport stuff from -- stuff that less than 25 years ago used to still be grown/manufactured IN the US.
And wait and see what happens to prices if/when "The Decider" decides to bomb Iran. I hope to God he's stopped before that happens, but I don't have any hopes in the US Congress. They've fluffed Kucinich off, and the world will pay for it.