Detailed Info

What can be said about these scumbags that hasn’t already been said? Have you ever seen brokers talk to one another online or watched one of their videos on youtube?! It makes my blood boil with unbelievable anger. Brokers are usually these big conglomerates that take advantage of carriers, but they don’t have to be big at all to rob us. All it takes to become a broker and start robbing carriers is a $300 broker authority (a license to steal), a $100 cell phone, a $200 laptop and the comfort of their mother’s basement. It’s not always that simple, but it kind of is, and this represents a broker based in the US. Of course, they can be based in Russia, India, the Philippines or anywhere else for all you know, where a laptop goes for a couple of walnuts or somewhere around there. It doesn’t take much to become a scumbag broker.

On the other hand, we all know the difficulties of becoming an owner-operator and staying in business. It takes a hell of a lot more than that, not the least of which is buying and maintaining the crazy expensive equipment, which you may have just paid $150,000 for, while also being stressed at all times knowing that we can kill people on the road while also watching out for the cops at every turn because they can turn a barely profitable load into a losing one. We are hurting due to inflation, rising fuel costs, rising insurance costs, rising toll costs, rising interest costs on equipment, expensive and scarce quality equipment, rising parts and labor costs, harder and harder to find parts (which are mostly made in China to maximize shop profits), getting robbed by tow services, road services, shops that don’t know what they’re doing most of the time and let’s not forget the weigh stations that are always looking to make a couple bucks… the list goes on and on, including the things that nobody wants to discuss like driver physical and mental health and alarming rates of driver depression (we’ll get into that a little later), but what are the brokers hurting from?! No matter if the shipper is paying more or less on their loads, they will always be profitable because they’ll just take our money and put it in their pockets because they can and we haven’t done a single thing to stop them.

We spend all our money on equipment and its’ maintenance, keeping ourselves legal and insured and all the other stuff just to then have to deal with a scumbag broker trying to give us a load for $400 after stealing a $1,000 off the top, while we may have mortgaged our house to get into this industry with the best equipment we can barely afford and are now screwed because of broker’s shady business practices that will make us lose our house! The point is, we assume all the risk for very little reward, while brokers get to have a normal life, go home to their families every day and make way more than we do. This is not right, and cannot be allowed to continue! It’s come to a point where brokers are charging 40% to 60%+ off the top just by taking advantage of the fact that we need to keep going to pay for our equipment and feed our families and don’t want to go work for Swift. If this continues, most of the OOSC will be bankrupt and the mega-carriers and scumbag brokers will survive and thrive without us. The company responsible for the load and everything else should get most of the money from that load, not the other way around!

Another aspect to all this is if the shipper decides not to pay, the carrier is the one that loses everything, not the broker. The broker isn’t responsible to make sure everyone is paid, or anything else besides robbing carriers. If my truck breaks down and I have to cancel a load, is the broker going to hop into their own truck to make the shipper happy and deliver their load? Of course not. They’re just a broker, which is nothing but a middle man, so why do we allow them to get paid equal to or more than us?! Here’s another scenario: imagine a scumbag broker can no longer continue their operations, so they decide to take all the loads they can from shippers, have the carriers deliver them, but then don’t pay any of the carriers and just keep all the money for themselves because they’re on their way to bankruptcy anyway, so why bother? And to make matters worse, insurance companies have no problem with this scam, going against carriers all the time, offering us a tiny fraction of what we lost, if anything at all. What about double-brokering and then robbing the carrier? What about when we ask for a couple extra bucks on a load we’re calling about just to have these scumbags tell us the load’s gone and that they sold it for the money they were offering or less, just to rub it in our faces. And how about when we leave bad broker reviews somewhere or say something they don’t want to hear like we don’t haul cheap freight, so they try to get our carrier info (mc numbers) to blacklist us in their system and report us to other brokers thru Carrier411 in an attempt to bankrupt us for going against them.  And after all their lies, when we don’t trust them and want to call the shipper just to confirm our appointment and to check if we even have one, we get yelled at by these scumbags for going behind their backs. Their list of tricks goes on and on, just like the lies they tell us. All of this is despicable behavior but I say we do the same and go against them in full force!

So with all that robbing, cheating and stealing the brokers do, how successful are they really? I mean, carriers are going out of business left and right. You see it in the news all the time: 140 driver company closed or 455 driver company went bankrupt and couldn’t even afford to pay their drivers to get home, leaving them stranded. Surely the brokers are also hurting in this down market, right?! Wrong! They are thriving like they always have, reporting great profits to their shareholders, but where do those profits come from?! We all know the answer to that question. They come from the aforementioned robbing, cheating and stealing from us, but don’t take my word for it. I couldn’t believe my eyes when I looked up the values of some of the biggest scumbags calling themselves brokers today:

• TQL: $8,000,000,000

• CH Robinson: $12,000,000,000

• JB Hunt: $18,200,000,000

• Schneider Nat’l: $5,000,000,000

• XPO: $4,000,000,000

Obviously some of them do other stuff that accounts for some of their value, however, their brokerage divisions do very well. But the question remains: how could brokers be worth so much without robbing carriers?! The simple answer: they can’t. All their income was stolen from OOSC. Simply put: that’s our money!!! Any of your hard-working OOSC companies worth $4,000,000,000? I didn’t think so.

Even the Ford Motor Company is getting their act together and getting rid of brokers (the independent dealer network). In a recent report, Ford is sick and tired of dealers up-charging whatever they want on top of MSRP to rip off their customers, so Ford decided to sell their cars directly online and just use the dealers for test drives and repairs. Smart move to get rid of the brokers and go direct. I say we follow suit. Brokers are always saying it’s our fault for taking cheap freight and we don’t have to take their loads, so I say, using their logic, we don’t have to take their loads or use brokers at all and make them a thing of the past!

check out our other detailed info pages for more info