Expensive diesel fuel isn’t just driving up costs—it’s driving trucking companies out of business.

  • adarza@lemmy.ca
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    4 hours ago

    there’s an outfit here that had like 20-30 rigs and that many drivers running all over the u.s. and canada. guy that owned it bragged about all his drivers making well over 100k a year. big maga freak, giant signs and flags along the street in front of his office and shop. he had the most and the biggest signs in town.

    fast forward two years…

    no tractors. no trailers. wash bays empty. service garage empty. only the occasional car at the office building. the last remaining tractors disappeared a few months ago.

    fuckwit still puts up the giant signs and flags.

    • mechoman444@lemmy.world
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      3 hours ago

      You know why right?

      You know why he still has the big signs up and why he’s still considers himself to be a supporter of trump and his ilk?

      Because politics in America are treated like team sports… Got to stick by your team in the good years and the bad unfortunately it’s just not how politics work you can’t just trade a bad politician for a better one from another state.

  • mechoman444@lemmy.world
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    3 hours ago

    One of the fundamental issues I have with private corporations is how they seem to think raising prices is going to work indefinitely.

    Prices should fluctuate with the market, but they never seem to come back down, at least not significantly. You cannot simply keep raising prices forever to avoid taking a loss, because eventually you are going to incur losses anyway. Nobody is going to buy your product if it becomes too expensive.

    Diesel being $6.30 a gallon in America is ostentatious. It may not be completely unreasonable given the circumstances, but that doesn’t make it any less absurd.

    And when it comes to petroleum, it doesn’t actually matter that much whether a particular company makes money every single quarter. Somebody is going to step in and sell it at whatever price the market will support, as long as there is demand.

    I think we have been conned, as a society, into believing that corporations simply cannot incur losses or they will immediately go out of business. Historically, that has never really been the case. Essential businesses and gargantuan corporations are consistently propped up by governments, investors, and financial institutions because, in many cases, we simply cannot allow them to fail.

    We cannot currently function as a modern society without diesel.

    So when a company says, essentially, “We have to raise prices because otherwise we’ll lose money,” my response is: Okay. Then lose some money.

    Businesses are allowed to have bad years. They are allowed to make less profit. They are even allowed to lose money. The idea that every company must continually increase prices, maintain or increase profit margins, and never meaningfully absorb a loss is not some immutable law of economics. It is a business model.

  • smeenz@lemmy.nz
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    10 hours ago

    Some of you may go bankrupt, but it’s price trump is willing for you to pay

    • Fmstrat@lemmy.world
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      11 hours ago

      i have a different theory on some of these specific businesses.

      • Bankrupt
        • Tax write off
        • Drop “contrwct” employees who pay for their own vehicle
        • Sell debt on leased trailers for dimes on the dollar
        • No true consequence for business owner
      • Gas price go down
        • New business
        • Rehire contract workers
        • New loans for depreciated trailers
        • Bankruptcy more profitable than operation

      Edit: Digging deeper into source links of source links, all the big players with multiple trailers and big contracts like Amazon are Chapter 11 (reorganized), so yea, my theory holds.

    • SSETranquility@lemmy.world
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      16 hours ago

      I heard part of project 2025 is to bankrupt vital business, like grocery store trucks, in order to buy them up to create a monopoly. Just evil…

  • TrackenDaKracken@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    Four weeks left till midterms.

    I’ll be voting as far left as I can, as I always have. I expect there will be quite a few newcomers doing the same.

    I’m grateful to the founders of this country giving states control over elections. That might just save us. Fingers crossed.

  • HobbitFoot @thelemmy.club
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    1 day ago

    That isn’t surprising. Trucking is a razor thin commodity service and any pricing shock will ruin companies.

    • ElChinchilla@lemmy.world
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      22 hours ago

      How does one transport the components of an AI infrastructure? That’s correct. The tubes. Elons millions of miles of tubes.

  • answersplease77@lemmy.world
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    21 hours ago

    Clients postpond contracts and cancel projects, layoffs, can’t import parts, can’t export products with margin, and that’s how businesses cannot function until they get bankrupt

  • Freeposity@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    The article doesn’t state what the normal number of bankruptcies is. So we can’t really tell from a single number if this is normal, better or worse.