jaytayent:
the nodding donkey:
What you’re saying is that your idea would work, if there was no competition to undercut your rates.And there is where it falls down.
There will always be competition who want to undercut (such is capitalism), companies and hauliers that do this only screw themselves over in the long run as they won’t survive. But that wasn’t the point I was making, maybe I haven’t explained it in the right way…
What I meant is that the idea would need large numbers of people (hauliers and companies shipping goods alike) in order to work efficiently, where there would always be loads and vehicles to match together.
If I was to create this platform, would you all be interested in using it, or at the very least giving it a trial?
Aren’t you just imagining, what already exists for real as the internal workings of the normal large firm?
The “middleman” is cut out, in the sense that both the internal administration which allocates work is as streamlined as profit will allow (large companies will be the first to use algorithms if they work), and the driver (in his more expensive capacity as an owner-operator) is also cut out.
The size of the firm also allows them to buy slack capacity in the sense of having a slight surplus of drivers and vehicles (to insure against delays, accidents, etc.), and their size relative to the customer (and their increased ability to set prices) allows them to charge consistently for the cost of providing and maintaining the slack capacity (which is something that improves the reliability of their operation).
People on this thread seem to think that there is some magical way using technology in which everyone can be an owner-operator, have a good standard of living, and yet still be operating in the free marketplace! The “undercutters” will not eventually learn their lesson and stop entering the marketplace (unless there are very high barriers to entry and forfeits for exiters) - what will happen is that the entire marketplace fails, because anyone trying to run a stable business (whether an established firm or newcomer) will find it impossible to consistently charge enough to survive, and there will just be violent convulsions in prices and availability of service, until the market becomes too disorganised and unpredictable to meet customer’s needs (and they will either then set up their own in-house haulage with employed drivers, or cease their business too).
The marketplace is like a shoe fetish for some people - they are more aroused by the prospect of a corpse wearing the shoe, than they are by a healthy relationship without the shoe. And when they are drawn to the shoe but find the corpse is non-responsive, they start imagining wildly about all these technological gadgets, all these new ways of relating to the corpse, as if somehow anything is going to create a healthy human relationship when the partner they have chosen is a shoe worn by a corpse.
And the shoe in this case is something that turns a wearer into a corpse - like an arsenic-laced tonic, an asbestos tablecloth, or a necklace of radioactive metal. Their chosen fetish is the thing that turns healthy wearers into corpses. Road haulage wore the market shoe in the 1970s and 1980s, and now most owner-drivers are corpses (or living on as employed drivers on moribund pay and conditions, where wages have also worn the market shoe and have suffered as a result).
The heyday of private road haulage (as something that provided a good living for those working in it) was when it had only just emerged from the womb of state ownership, when capital investment (in purpose-built depots, vehicles and trailers, trained workers, etc.) had been paid for through taxation (rather than through charging customers in the marketplace), when markets continued to be regulated extensively, and then it put on the market shoe and has staggered down toward poverty ever since.
