Posted on 04/21/2002 12:40:13 AM PDT by JohnHuang2
KLAHOMA CITY, April 18 — Judging from the number of 18-wheelers rumbling in and out of the Flying J truck stop here on Interstate 40, the economy has left the recession in the dust. For a couple of weeks, a "Now Hiring" banner has been fluttering out front; business is up and the place needs two more cashiers and a midlevel manager.
Drivers still balk at buying trinkets and gifts in the Flying J's store, and waitresses say drivers are still watching their tips. But they are buying more fuel, and few sit around anymore waiting for loads to fill their empty trailers.
"I don't have as much downtime," said Ron Jones, 40, stopping on his way to Lawton, Okla., for a shipment of Goodyear tires to haul to DeKalb, Ill. Danny Hamby, the stop's general manager, said, "I don't think we're in a rut anymore."
Economists and Wall Street analysts mix and mold all kinds of statistics — on employment, inventories, industrial production, lending and borrowing, consumer and capital spending, imports and exports, profits and losses — to assess the economy's pulse. A year after they declared the start of the recession, some have lately been drawing the economy's course in the shape of a "W," showing it slipping again after falling and bouncing a bit. Optimists see it scaling the valley of a "V." Pessimists are drawing an "L."
But truck drivers, who can offer what is perhaps a more tangible assessment of the economy, say they believe growth, at least in terms of the goods they carry, has begun inching up the eastern slope of a "U."
"Around Christmas, I'd be ready to go, and they wouldn't have a load for me," Mr. Jones said, digging into a Flying J breakfast burrito as big as his foot. He was on his way to pick up a load of Goodyear tires, having just brought a shipment of automotive oil from Mississippi to Oklahoma City. "I could be sitting for six or seven days, and they wouldn't have a load for me. I don't sit much at all now."
There is good reason to trust in the accuracy of the 18-wheel economy. "We haul the raw materials that products are made of," explained Don Weaver, 60, who was in the middle of a trip carrying cedar mulch from Paris, Tex., to Wichita. "We haul the product after it's finished."
According to the American Trucking Association, truck drivers carry 67 percent of the nation's domestic freight as measured by weight and 87 percent as measured by value. In weight, truck freight reached a peak in December 1999, the trucking association's chief economist, Bob Costello, said. It plunged 17 percent by July 2000, presaging the recession, and the events of Sept. 11 kept it down through last year. But by February, Mr. Costello said, traffic had climbed about 5 percent from the trough.
That has also been the experience of David McCorkle, the association's chairman and owner of a truck company that runs 85 tractor-trailers. Mr. McCorkle said his trucks, which haul cement, gypsum, lime and sand for builders, factories and oil companies, were busy again after the post-Sept. 11 slowdown. For the industry, he said, "the prospects seem to be pretty good."
Jim Baertschi, 54, detects all the signs of an incipient boom. He owns a Peterbilt truck, layered with polished chrome, and leases his services to the Allied Automotive Group, a car-hauling company. On this trip, he was taking four Chevrolet truck cabs and chassis to New Mexico.
"I haul from the General Motors plant in Janesville, Wis.," Mr. Baertschi said, adding that he was one of 160 owner-operators normally leased to Allied. "For the last two years, we had 50 laid off. They've all been called back. In fact, they want to hire more."
A few Flying J customers have yet to feel much recovery. Gene Griffey, for example, went deep into debt to acquire eight trucks over the last decade. He hired drivers and started running the trucks from his home in Asheville, N.C.
But Mr. Griffey, 52, is using just one truck now, and he is driving it himself. He lost a major customer, a window manufacturer in Texas that went bankrupt. Customers in the North Carolina furniture industry, crippled by the recession, shut down.
"I'm working out of my yard now," he said. "I've sold five trucks. I still have three, and they're for sale. I laid the last driver off in January."
Another owner-operator, Earl Gillespie, 50, said the investments in capital goods that he sees as a sign of recovery — loads of assembly-line machinery, factory air-conditioning systems, I-beams — had yet to appear. His loads have fallen 30 percent in less than a year.
Steven Toth, 45, who forms a driving team with his wife, Debra, 48, has seen better times, too. As drivers for the U.S. Xpress Enterprises truck line, the Toths were carrying Compaq computers from Carson, Calif., to Indianapolis.
They are getting some decent loads, allowing them together to earn $110,000 a year. But they are not back to normal. "In the late 90's we would normally run between 5,300 and 6,300 miles a week," Mr. Toth said. "Now it's a struggle to make 5,000."
Many drivers at the Flying J wondered about the fate of just-in-time delivery, the innovation that helped sustain the trucking boom in the 1990's. Rather than pack warehouses with goods that would be used in weeks or months, factories and store chains turned to trucks to deliver the goods when they needed them.
The ability to provide this sort of service stalled after Sept. 11. Many companies had to halt production because the airplanes and ships that brought foreign components and materials ground to a halt. It was not long before the slowed-down trucking business slowed even further.
But some drivers, like Ronald Doan of El Paso, are beginning to feel the just-in-time heat again. "I've got a load of plastic drinking cups I'm taking from Shreveport, La., and making three stops, the last one in Chino, Calif.," said Mr. Doan, 61. Each stop had to hit a warehouse early enough in the morning so that local distributors could then transfer the cups to restaurants in the area.
The deliveries are "nerve-racking," Mr. Doan said. But they also mean "we're getting busy."
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| GI Trucking Company's business is coming back strong; good indication for the economy. |
You scoff, but you should see the overtime pay!
I'd appreciate leads on getting a job. I'm Mom ' Pop school trained with little OTR.
Freepmail me.
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