You can’t Blitz Reefer!
Tender rejections are rising! Well, two days at the end of Blitz week is hardly a surprise and certainly not indicative of a market reversal.
But it’s a headline.
A quick lesson: rejections indicate available capacity. Higher rejections mean less capacity or too many loads for the carriers to handle. Not perfect, but good enough.
The real story is that reefer rejections continue to plummet as the produce season heats up!
This means that capacity is still very loose and more and more loads are being accepted during a season when loads should be putting major pressure on the reefer carriers. Rejections should be going up in a “normal produce season.”
Couple that with Blitz week and we should see at least a leveling of the tender rejections.
If you add one tiny (well not so tiny) piece of data to the mix it all makes sense.
TLT – Tender lead time. This is the time in days between a shipper (or broker) sending a tender to a carrier and the actual pick-up date.
Time to check out the SONAR chart below.
The chart to the left is measuring tender rejections for the nation in blue, dry van in green, and reefer in orange. The dry van category is driving up the national average at this time.
Again, in a “normal” season it would be reefer capacity driving the rejection index up.
It isn’t.
Two things happening here are the fact that reefer capacity is still much greater than the demand even in the early stages of the produce season. The other is tender lead times.
The chart on the right shows tender lead times for reefer in blue and dry van in purple.
Reefer is at 4.25 days while dry van is at 2.6.
Reefer loads are being tendered after Blitz week.
Blitz week started on Tuesday. Count with me, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Monday… that would be 4 days of tender lead time.
Reefer doesn’t sweat Blitz week.
Read more articles from Michael “The Dude” Vincent
Peace and love!
