货运业复苏但司机不满，周期与结构性变化并存

I'm looking at a headline right now from I guess this is a stat from Roadmaster Group, but they're saying cargo theft jumped 60% last year. That just came out three years ago. And also, there's a New York Times headline saying nearly 11,000 bottles of bourbon were stolen from a Philadelphia warehouse as a result of coordinated cargo. It's funny because you and I both just assumed that when you said cargo things like grabbing boxes.

Yeah. Like, you know, like like in, Goodfellas, where you're like, that's as far as my criminal ambitions can strike. And then the truck driver is like, please beat me up. Right. Do you remember that in Goodfellas? He was like, please beat me up so that my own boss does not think that I stole it. And. But this is what they've targeted. They've targeted Guy Fieri. Guy Fieri had freight stolen like all these celebrities in the last like, year, have, like, seemingly come out with liquor brands and they're all being targeted to like I think Shaq's like range Rover got stolen off a car cop car hauler.

Like, there's there's been all sorts of crazy stuff. Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Joe Wiesenthal and I'm Tracy Alloway. It's been too long since we've done a trucking episode. This is just an objective fact that we need to get out of the way. It is time. I mean, to be fair. To be fair, I think we both written about trucking in the slots newsletter shortly. I think back in January, you started to get some of the freight and logistics companies talking about maybe they were starting to see an upturn.

Yes. And looking at some share prices since then. So I've got look up Knight Swift at the back. But what's the ticker? I mean it's knx okay, KNX gup knight swifter, you know, J.B. hunt, but Knight Swift is a little bit more dramatic. I mean, since January of this year. Yeah. No, it's a great run. It's, it's had a great run. So I think the trucking rebound, it seems to be here. It seems to be here. You know, the problem with going like a long time I mean, as you mentioned, we do write about it.

So it's not like we're ignoring. But one of the things that we learned when we did a lot of trucking episodes, particularly in the years after the pandemic, was like when we talk about, like, the business cycle, you know, it's like these multi-year cycles when truckers talk about the cycle, there might be like eight up and down, two cycles within one boom or within one recession. Just extraordinary cyclical. Right. So if we or hopefully anyone else have learned one thing from the truck episodes, it is that this is such an incredibly cyclical industry.

And the standard explanation is that you have these really low barriers to entry for, you know, owner operators and trucks. And so as soon as trucking rates start to go up, everyone decides to become a trucker. Yeah, the market gets flooded, it over expands, and then inevitably, the rates start to come down. And then you have a bunch of independent owner operators who start to go bust, and then capacity comes out and the whole cycle can begin again.

A true is there seems real boom bust. And you mentioned the share prices of Nate Swift and J.B. hunt. But another way to look at it, I'm just looking at the the internet truck stop van rate index, just a sort of basic measure of how much it cost to move. That was at in, December of last year. It's like .94, I guess that's probably per mile. And now it's up to it. Broke three. It came down a little bit. So just by measuring the cost of, the trucking, it's clearly gone up.

So we need to figure out what's going on. Sorry, I'm just looking at this, this knight chart again. The knight Swift chart. You know, they've outperformed meta this year. That's amazing. I know, look at J.B. hunt. I think it's you. And that one's, like, almost a double. Yeah, yeah. Like, forget about I. The money apparently is in trucking. How are for real. How is how the cycle starts, right. How people start saying the money is in trucking and then everyone gets it.

How are the turbines getting to the data centers? How are all like, right. Like we know that there is a lot of sort of demand for physical goods as part of this AI story. And the the physical goods have to get to the data center somehow. Right? I think this is part of the story. This is the question, is this the sort of same rebound that we've seen before, or is there maybe something more structural that's happening?

We've also had some recent developments with the, like the actual supply of truck drivers. Right. Which is also something that clearly impacts capacity. So there's a lot to talk about. There's a lot to talk about. It's time to revisit the trucking market. We have a guest that we've never had on, before, but someone really like someone I've known from the internet for a while who really knows the space very well. We're going to be speaking with Reed Loustalot.

He is the chief marketing officer at Truck Parking Club. And so, Reed, thank you so much for coming on Odd Lots. Joe Tracy, thanks for having me. Joe, I got to give you credit, man. I said you weren't going to do it, but you did it. And you said my name, right? So congratulations. Thank you. All right. Test cleared, for this, episode. What is, let's just actually. What are you. Who are you? Who what what's your background?

What's the truck park and club and all that? Why are we talking to you? Yeah, sure. So I'm, my name is Reed Loustalot. I have been in freight my entire career, which at this point is is a feels like a long and short ten years at the same time. Started out of college at a freight brokerage. It was a large, large freight brokerage, top five freight brokerage. Then spent some time at a technology company called Trimble.

Did my own thing for a bit. That's where I encountered you on the, in the interwebs. Yeah, 3 or 4 years ago. Just kind of stirring the pot on Twitter. And then I joined Truck Parking Club about three years ago, and really have been focused on, on truck parking for the last three years, which we can, we can talk about because that's a trending topic as well. But yeah, I mean, I've been I've been in freight my, my whole career and, and I'm, I'm a free guy and, and I now live in Chattanooga, which is, has been dubbed Freight Alley, by by Craig Fuller, and, Yeah.

So I'm, I'm I'm in it, man. Right. So the the parking thing is really interesting here because if you think about, a truck or a freight rebound, you think about things actually moving. Yeah. Right. But I'm curious, from your perspective, does a rebound look like more trucks actually having to stop and find parking, like, desperately circling for a place, I don't know, around a data center or something like that and trying to find space like is a healthy trucking market, does that.

What does that look like to to a company that is in the truck parking space? You know, naturally, as, as as demand increase increases, we'll see. See more trucks on the road? I mean, there's there's there's you trace, you kind of talked about a number of the trending topics ahead of this, you know, and you talked about the cyclical nature of trucking and, and, and, the barrier to entry, if you will. So there's, there's it's a very multivariate, you know, market and, and truck parking is one of those things that structurally, it's very difficult to construct new capacity because it's very limited in where you can do it.

It's expensive. Many municipalities don't want it. And so there's a bunch of structural reasons why it's difficult to quickly increase the supply in the traditional sense. You know, and what we've done is really just leverage the existing space. So there's millions of truck parking spaces across the US that are on private property. And we've just built a network, a marketplace to tap into that. So we go to owners, we say, hey, you can make some money.

Parking trucks comes on our app, drivers use our app, find parking on priva