|
Looking to boost the profits of your haulage company, or just trying to survive in an increasingly competitive marketplace? Learn more about return loads and groupage, two of the essential ways of improving haulage efficiency.
On a long haul road haulage job, a lorry driver can be on the road for days or even weeks. That’s a long time for something to go wrong with your lorry – and if you are stuck by the side of the road waiting for help and paying for repairs, you and your company will be losing time and money.
Whether it is through luck or fate, lorries just seem to keep finding their way to the centre of the most bizarre news stories and urban myths around the internet. Weird and wonderful, strange and terrible, the crazy lorry stories just keep appearing. There certainly are some strange lorry stories out there – bee filled lorry crashes, chocolate powered lorries, and even a church that was moved 100 miles on the back of a lorry!
As times get tighter and costs fluctuate, companies are rightly worried about profit margins and staying afloat. While many companies try to pass the effects of these changing costs onto the customer, the widely varied price elasticity of demand for products means that often these fluctuations (in real terms) of price can’t be passed on to customers; i.e, changes in price mean a steep or shallow rise or fall in demand for your product depending on what the product is.
I’ve written about lorry driver urban legends before, but they just keep cropping up all over the internet. I’m not sure quite why lorry drivers and their vehicles often seem to be at the centre of these kinds of stories - my theory is that it’s the lorry drivers themselves who spread them while running haulage jobs and return loads all over the world! Perhaps it is just that many urban legends take place on the road, and lorry drivers make for convenient and plausible participants.
If you read any lorry-centric news sites at the moment, you’ll be aware that times are not exactly good. Fuel prices are higher than ever, there are taxes to enter major city centres and to top it all off the whole world is suffering from an economic downturn. The big companies will manage to get through this, no doubt, but what about the independent lorry drivers - the owner operators? It’s going to be a struggle for some of them undoubtedly, but cutting down on unnecessary expenses can allow them to fight another day.
|
