Hey everyone,

If it's your first time reading one of my posts, my name is Menachem, and I have a weekly newsletter called Logistic Pulse that breaks down the top logistics news from the past week, so you're always up to date.

Let's jump into it.

UPS found the one corner of GLP-1 mania nobody was fighting over

We've spent two editions now on what Ozempic is doing to your apparel clients. Edition 45 covered the wardrobe boom, and Edition 49 covered the brutal returns wave as customers keep shrinking out of clothes they bought three weeks ago. This week, UPS reminded everyone there's a whole other GLP-1 logistics story, and it's a much happier one if you're on the right side of it.

UPS is investing $48 million in 27 temperature-controlled cross-dock facilities across the Americas, Europe, and Asia. The pitch is cold chain: drugs like Wegovy and Ozempic need strict refrigeration in transit, and with roughly 1 in 8 Americans now on a GLP-1, that's a tidal wave of temperature-sensitive volume that simply cannot afford to break custody. The market backs the bet. Temperature-sensitive biologics are projected to grow at an 8.3% clip through 2033, heading toward a $39 billion market. And the stakes aren't just commercial. The WHO estimates that up to half of global vaccines are wasted every year, a big chunk of that due to cold-chain failures.

The strategic read here is that UPS is doubling down on exactly the premium, defensible territory it's been retreating into. CEO Carol Tomé said healthcare hit its first-ever $3 billion revenue quarter in Q1 and has gained market share every year since 2021. This is the same playbook we flagged when Amazon opened its Supply Chain Services to everyone back in Edition 45: the carriers walking away from thin Amazon volume and planting flags in high-margin, high-complexity work that's hard to commoditize. Cold-chain pharma is about as hard to commoditize as logistics gets.

What this means for you: If you serve healthcare, biotech, or pharma brands, the demand signal just got louder, and the infrastructure spend says the big players expect it to keep climbing. This is also a reminder that's worth sitting with as Amazon keeps eating the standardized middle of the market. The work that requires real custody, real specialization, and real consequences for getting it wrong is the work that holds its margin. A pallet of t-shirts is a pallet of t-shirts. A pallet of biologics at the wrong temperature is a destroyed shipment and a patient who doesn't get treated. That gap is your lane.

Prime Day sale tells you everything about the consumer

Amazon has basically run out of people to sell Prime memberships to. Over 86% of online shoppers are already members, up from about 40 million U.S. consumers when Prime Day launched in 2015 to around 200 million now. When you've saturated the market, the growth game changes. You stop trying to add members and start squeezing more orders out of the ones you've got.

You can see that shift in what's on sale this year. Instead of the big-ticket electronics that defined early Prime Days, Amazon is pushing hot dogs, energy drinks, and K-beauty. Groceries and everyday essentials. These items make Amazon less money per sale, but that's the point: they're loss leaders designed to get you to open the app more often, which is where the real money is made later. It's the grocery-and-delivery battleground, and Amazon is far from alone in it. Nearly 60% of Prime members who plan to shop this week say they'll also check Walmart's competing sale, and Walmart+ keeps stacking on delivery perks to match.

There's a thread running under all this that we've been pulling on since Edition 48. This is the K-shaped, trade-down consumer showing up in Amazon's own strategy. When the squeezed half of the economy is buying hot dogs and energy drinks instead of TVs, the biggest retailer on earth restructures its marquee shopping event around hot dogs and energy drinks. The consumer told Amazon what they're buying, and Amazon listened.

What this means for you: If you fulfill for grocery, CPG, or everyday essentials brands, this is a tailwind. The whole retail apparatus is reorganizing around frequent, low-ticket, fast-delivery purchases, and that's volume flowing through fulfillment networks all year, not just on sale days. If your clients skew toward discretionary big-ticket goods, the same signal reads as a yellow light, the same one Whirlpool flashed back in Edition 48. Either way, by the time you read the next edition, you'll have four days of live Prime Day volume to tell you which way your book is actually leaning.

Tired of hosting a graveyard for your clients' dead inventory?

We all have that one brand. They’ve got 40 pallets of slow-moving or returned stock taking up premium rack space. They complain about storage fees every month, but they won't pull the trigger on liquidating it.

Stock fixes this. It’s a white-labeled platform that lets your clients donate their excess inventory to verified nonprofits as easily as placing a standard e-commerce order.

• You get your pallet positions back immediately.
• Your clients get a clean tax write-off and stop complaining about holding costs.
• Your 3PL can white-label the service, charge a processing fee, and look like a hero.

Stop letting zombie inventory kill your warehouse utilization.

Book a call with the founder >

Peak season is showing up early. Plan your dock around June, not August.

If you've been pacing your staffing and storage plans to a normal calendar, here's your heads-up to move them forward. The Port of LA moved 840,165 TEUs in May, up 17% year over year, and director Gene Seroka is projecting that both June and July will clear 900,000 TEUs. Translation: the inbound wave is arriving weeks ahead of when you'd usually brace for it.

The reason isn't a roaring economy. It's importers grabbing what Seroka calls a "window of stability" and rushing cargo through while they can. With tariffs changing on a near-constant basis and energy costs swinging on Gulf headlines, companies are operating on short planning horizons and frontloading inventory the moment conditions allow. The National Retail Federation's Global Port Tracker sees the same trend: an early peak season, with the bump landing in June and July rather than the usual late-summer surge. It's the tariff-frontloading reflex we've watched all year, except this time the trigger is "move it before the next policy shock" rather than any one specific deadline.

The Gulf situation is the quiet co-author of all this. You may have seen the U.S. and Iran signed a memorandum of understanding to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, and that's real progress. But Seroka threw cold water on anyone expecting a fast snap-back: it'll take shipping lines months to normalize schedules, clear backlogs, and get things to "some semblance of normalcy." So the relief is coming, just not in time to change your Q3. He also flagged that some importers haven't yet absorbed the full hit from higher energy prices on the land side, meaning there's still a cost increase working its way through to your clients' invoices.

What this means for you: Two moves. First, if your inbound is coming from the West Coast, assume your busy stretch starts now, not in August. Pull your labor ramp and your space planning forward, because the cargo isn't waiting for the calendar. Second, have the volume conversation with your brands early; the same advice we gave back in Edition 45 about getting real Q3 and Q4 numbers instead of leaning on last year's. An early peak that gets pulled forward can also mean a softer back half if everyone frontloaded, so you want to know whether your clients are moving holiday inventory early or genuinely growing. Staffing for a peak that already happened is an expensive way to find out.

QUICK HITS

Cargofy raised $6 million to put a "digital employee" in your dispatch office. The Series A, led by u.ventures and Toloka.vc with Intercom co-founder Des Traynor along for the ride, funds a platform that plugs into 70-plus tools freight operators already use and automates the grind: emailing carriers, chasing documents, coordinating dispatch, all around the clock. The numbers Cargofy is throwing around are eye-catching: one dispatcher managing a fleet 10x the usual size, a 315-truck operation saving $83,000 a month. Treat the self-reported stats with appropriate salt, but the direction is clear.

SFO is spending over $300 million to automate its air cargo. San Francisco International is building a 310,000-square-foot, two-story automated cargo terminal, with the German specialist Lödige supplying three Elevating Transfer Vehicles that move cargo units vertically and horizontally simultaneously. The goal is faster turnarounds and the throughput to keep SFO competitive as a West Coast gateway. It opens in 2028, part of a broader air-freight modernization wave as hubs race to expand to meet rising e-commerce and value-dense cargo volumes.

Burlington is planting a 2-million-square-foot DC near the Port of Savannah. The off-price chain is adding a major East Coast replenishment hub in Ellabell, Georgia, on top of the nearly 2-million-square-foot automated DC it broke ground on in Arizona this spring. Burlington opens stores at a clip of roughly 100 a year, and its opportunistic, buy-it-when-you-see-it model places unusual emphasis on what happens inside the four walls. As their ops director put it, the back-of-house work is as important as the storefront, sometimes more. When merchandise shows up in random forms and quantities, the warehouse is where the treasure hunt actually gets built. (Read more)

DEI stances are quietly reshaping where people shop. New Human Rights Campaign research found roughly 72% of LGBTQ+ consumers say they're buying less from companies they see as pulling back on diversity commitments, with Target, Walmart, Amazon, Chick-Fil-A, and Home Depot most often named. On the flip side, about 70% say they reward companies they view as supportive, with Costco, Apple, and Kroger leading there. Why it lands on this desk: that's a $1.7 trillion consumer bloc, and several of the named names are brands whose fulfillment volume you may be touching. Shifts in where this group spends eventually show up as shifts in whose boxes move.
_______________________________________________________________________

That's all for this week. If you found this useful, consider subscribing.
(Your data will not be shared. Subscribers' data is strictly for sending out the weekly newsletter.)

Hey everyone,

If it's your first time reading one of my posts, my name is Menachem, and I have a weekly newsletter called Logistic Pulse that breaks down the top logistics news from the past week, so you're always up to date.

Let's jump into it.

UPS found the one corner of GLP-1 mania nobody was fighting over

We've spent two editions now on what Ozempic is doing to your apparel clients. Edition 45 covered the wardrobe boom, and Edition 49 covered the brutal returns wave as customers keep shrinking out of clothes they bought three weeks ago. This week, UPS reminded everyone there's a whole other GLP-1 logistics story, and it's a much happier one if you're on the right side of it.

UPS is investing $48 million in 27 temperature-controlled cross-dock facilities across the Americas, Europe, and Asia. The pitch is cold chain: drugs like Wegovy and Ozempic need strict refrigeration in transit, and with roughly 1 in 8 Americans now on a GLP-1, that's a tidal wave of temperature-sensitive volume that simply cannot afford to break custody. The market backs the bet. Temperature-sensitive biologics are projected to grow at an 8.3% clip through 2033, heading toward a $39 billion market. And the stakes aren't just commercial. The WHO estimates that up to half of global vaccines are wasted every year, a big chunk of that due to cold-chain failures.

The strategic read here is that UPS is doubling down on exactly the premium, defensible territory it's been retreating into. CEO Carol Tomé said healthcare hit its first-ever $3 billion revenue quarter in Q1 and has gained market share every year since 2021. This is the same playbook we flagged when Amazon opened its Supply Chain Services to everyone back in Edition 45: the carriers walking away from thin Amazon volume and planting flags in high-margin, high-complexity work that's hard to commoditize. Cold-chain pharma is about as hard to commoditize as logistics gets.

What this means for you: If you serve healthcare, biotech, or pharma brands, the demand signal just got louder, and the infrastructure spend says the big players expect it to keep climbing. This is also a reminder that's worth sitting with as Amazon keeps eating the standardized middle of the market. The work that requires real custody, real specialization, and real consequences for getting it wrong is the work that holds its margin. A pallet of t-shirts is a pallet of t-shirts. A pallet of biologics at the wrong temperature is a destroyed shipment and a patient who doesn't get treated. That gap is your lane.

Prime Day sale tells you everything about the consumer

Amazon has basically run out of people to sell Prime memberships to. Over 86% of online shoppers are already members, up from about 40 million U.S. consumers when Prime Day launched in 2015 to around 200 million now. When you've saturated the market, the growth game changes. You stop trying to add members and start squeezing more orders out of the ones you've got.

You can see that shift in what's on sale this year. Instead of the big-ticket electronics that defined early Prime Days, Amazon is pushing hot dogs, energy drinks, and K-beauty. Groceries and everyday essentials. These items make Amazon less money per sale, but that's the point: they're loss leaders designed to get you to open the app more often, which is where the real money is made later. It's the grocery-and-delivery battleground, and Amazon is far from alone in it. Nearly 60% of Prime members who plan to shop this week say they'll also check Walmart's competing sale, and Walmart+ keeps stacking on delivery perks to match.

There's a thread running under all this that we've been pulling on since Edition 48. This is the K-shaped, trade-down consumer showing up in Amazon's own strategy. When the squeezed half of the economy is buying hot dogs and energy drinks instead of TVs, the biggest retailer on earth restructures its marquee shopping event around hot dogs and energy drinks. The consumer told Amazon what they're buying, and Amazon listened.

What this means for you: If you fulfill for grocery, CPG, or everyday essentials brands, this is a tailwind. The whole retail apparatus is reorganizing around frequent, low-ticket, fast-delivery purchases, and that's volume flowing through fulfillment networks all year, not just on sale days. If your clients skew toward discretionary big-ticket goods, the same signal reads as a yellow light, the same one Whirlpool flashed back in Edition 48. Either way, by the time you read the next edition, you'll have four days of live Prime Day volume to tell you which way your book is actually leaning.

Tired of hosting a graveyard for your clients' dead inventory?

We all have that one brand. They’ve got 40 pallets of slow-moving or returned stock taking up premium rack space. They complain about storage fees every month, but they won't pull the trigger on liquidating it.

Stock fixes this. It’s a white-labeled platform that lets your clients donate their excess inventory to verified nonprofits as easily as placing a standard e-commerce order.

• You get your pallet positions back immediately.
• Your clients get a clean tax write-off and stop complaining about holding costs.
• Your 3PL can white-label the service, charge a processing fee, and look like a hero.

Stop letting zombie inventory kill your warehouse utilization.

Book a call with the founder >

Peak season is showing up early. Plan your dock around June, not August.

If you've been pacing your staffing and storage plans to a normal calendar, here's your heads-up to move them forward. The Port of LA moved 840,165 TEUs in May, up 17% year over year, and director Gene Seroka is projecting that both June and July will clear 900,000 TEUs. Translation: the inbound wave is arriving weeks ahead of when you'd usually brace for it.

The reason isn't a roaring economy. It's importers grabbing what Seroka calls a "window of stability" and rushing cargo through while they can. With tariffs changing on a near-constant basis and energy costs swinging on Gulf headlines, companies are operating on short planning horizons and frontloading inventory the moment conditions allow. The National Retail Federation's Global Port Tracker sees the same trend: an early peak season, with the bump landing in June and July rather than the usual late-summer surge. It's the tariff-frontloading reflex we've watched all year, except this time the trigger is "move it before the next policy shock" rather than any one specific deadline.

The Gulf situation is the quiet co-author of all this. You may have seen the U.S. and Iran signed a memorandum of understanding to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, and that's real progress. But Seroka threw cold water on anyone expecting a fast snap-back: it'll take shipping lines months to normalize schedules, clear backlogs, and get things to "some semblance of normalcy." So the relief is coming, just not in time to change your Q3. He also flagged that some importers haven't yet absorbed the full hit from higher energy prices on the land side, meaning there's still a cost increase working its way through to your clients' invoices.

What this means for you: Two moves. First, if your inbound is coming from the West Coast, assume your busy stretch starts now, not in August. Pull your labor ramp and your space planning forward, because the cargo isn't waiting for the calendar. Second, have the volume conversation with your brands early; the same advice we gave back in Edition 45 about getting real Q3 and Q4 numbers instead of leaning on last year's. An early peak that gets pulled forward can also mean a softer back half if everyone frontloaded, so you want to know whether your clients are moving holiday inventory early or genuinely growing. Staffing for a peak that already happened is an expensive way to find out.

QUICK HITS

Cargofy raised $6 million to put a "digital employee" in your dispatch office. The Series A, led by u.ventures and Toloka.vc with Intercom co-founder Des Traynor along for the ride, funds a platform that plugs into 70-plus tools freight operators already use and automates the grind: emailing carriers, chasing documents, coordinating dispatch, all around the clock. The numbers Cargofy is throwing around are eye-catching: one dispatcher managing a fleet 10x the usual size, a 315-truck operation saving $83,000 a month. Treat the self-reported stats with appropriate salt, but the direction is clear.

SFO is spending over $300 million to automate its air cargo. San Francisco International is building a 310,000-square-foot, two-story automated cargo terminal, with the German specialist Lödige supplying three Elevating Transfer Vehicles that move cargo units vertically and horizontally simultaneously. The goal is faster turnarounds and the throughput to keep SFO competitive as a West Coast gateway. It opens in 2028, part of a broader air-freight modernization wave as hubs race to expand to meet rising e-commerce and value-dense cargo volumes.

Burlington is planting a 2-million-square-foot DC near the Port of Savannah. The off-price chain is adding a major East Coast replenishment hub in Ellabell, Georgia, on top of the nearly 2-million-square-foot automated DC it broke ground on in Arizona this spring. Burlington opens stores at a clip of roughly 100 a year, and its opportunistic, buy-it-when-you-see-it model places unusual emphasis on what happens inside the four walls. As their ops director put it, the back-of-house work is as important as the storefront, sometimes more. When merchandise shows up in random forms and quantities, the warehouse is where the treasure hunt actually gets built. (Read more)

DEI stances are quietly reshaping where people shop. New Human Rights Campaign research found roughly 72% of LGBTQ+ consumers say they're buying less from companies they see as pulling back on diversity commitments, with Target, Walmart, Amazon, Chick-Fil-A, and Home Depot most often named. On the flip side, about 70% say they reward companies they view as supportive, with Costco, Apple, and Kroger leading there. Why it lands on this desk: that's a $1.7 trillion consumer bloc, and several of the named names are brands whose fulfillment volume you may be touching. Shifts in where this group spends eventually show up as shifts in whose boxes move.
_______________________________________________________________________

That's all for this week. If you found this useful, consider subscribing.
(Your data will not be shared. Subscribers' data is strictly for sending out the weekly newsletter.)

Hey everyone,

If it's your first time reading one of my posts, my name is Menachem, and I have a weekly newsletter called Logistic Pulse that breaks down the top logistics news from the past week, so you're always up to date.

Let's jump into it.

UPS found the one corner of GLP-1 mania nobody was fighting over

We've spent two editions now on what Ozempic is doing to your apparel clients. Edition 45 covered the wardrobe boom, and Edition 49 covered the brutal returns wave as customers keep shrinking out of clothes they bought three weeks ago. This week, UPS reminded everyone there's a whole other GLP-1 logistics story, and it's a much happier one if you're on the right side of it.

UPS is investing $48 million in 27 temperature-controlled cross-dock facilities across the Americas, Europe, and Asia. The pitch is cold chain: drugs like Wegovy and Ozempic need strict refrigeration in transit, and with roughly 1 in 8 Americans now on a GLP-1, that's a tidal wave of temperature-sensitive volume that simply cannot afford to break custody. The market backs the bet. Temperature-sensitive biologics are projected to grow at an 8.3% clip through 2033, heading toward a $39 billion market. And the stakes aren't just commercial. The WHO estimates that up to half of global vaccines are wasted every year, a big chunk of that due to cold-chain failures.

The strategic read here is that UPS is doubling down on exactly the premium, defensible territory it's been retreating into. CEO Carol Tomé said healthcare hit its first-ever $3 billion revenue quarter in Q1 and has gained market share every year since 2021. This is the same playbook we flagged when Amazon opened its Supply Chain Services to everyone back in Edition 45: the carriers walking away from thin Amazon volume and planting flags in high-margin, high-complexity work that's hard to commoditize. Cold-chain pharma is about as hard to commoditize as logistics gets.

What this means for you: If you serve healthcare, biotech, or pharma brands, the demand signal just got louder, and the infrastructure spend says the big players expect it to keep climbing. This is also a reminder that's worth sitting with as Amazon keeps eating the standardized middle of the market. The work that requires real custody, real specialization, and real consequences for getting it wrong is the work that holds its margin. A pallet of t-shirts is a pallet of t-shirts. A pallet of biologics at the wrong temperature is a destroyed shipment and a patient who doesn't get treated. That gap is your lane.

Prime Day sale tells you everything about the consumer

Amazon has basically run out of people to sell Prime memberships to. Over 86% of online shoppers are already members, up from about 40 million U.S. consumers when Prime Day launched in 2015 to around 200 million now. When you've saturated the market, the growth game changes. You stop trying to add members and start squeezing more orders out of the ones you've got.

You can see that shift in what's on sale this year. Instead of the big-ticket electronics that defined early Prime Days, Amazon is pushing hot dogs, energy drinks, and K-beauty. Groceries and everyday essentials. These items make Amazon less money per sale, but that's the point: they're loss leaders designed to get you to open the app more often, which is where the real money is made later. It's the grocery-and-delivery battleground, and Amazon is far from alone in it. Nearly 60% of Prime members who plan to shop this week say they'll also check Walmart's competing sale, and Walmart+ keeps stacking on delivery perks to match.

There's a thread running under all this that we've been pulling on since Edition 48. This is the K-shaped, trade-down consumer showing up in Amazon's own strategy. When the squeezed half of the economy is buying hot dogs and energy drinks instead of TVs, the biggest retailer on earth restructures its marquee shopping event around hot dogs and energy drinks. The consumer told Amazon what they're buying, and Amazon listened.

What this means for you: If you fulfill for grocery, CPG, or everyday essentials brands, this is a tailwind. The whole retail apparatus is reorganizing around frequent, low-ticket, fast-delivery purchases, and that's volume flowing through fulfillment networks all year, not just on sale days. If your clients skew toward discretionary big-ticket goods, the same signal reads as a yellow light, the same one Whirlpool flashed back in Edition 48. Either way, by the time you read the next edition, you'll have four days of live Prime Day volume to tell you which way your book is actually leaning.

Tired of hosting a graveyard for your clients' dead inventory?

We all have that one brand. They’ve got 40 pallets of slow-moving or returned stock taking up premium rack space. They complain about storage fees every month, but they won't pull the trigger on liquidating it.

Stock fixes this. It’s a white-labeled platform that lets your clients donate their excess inventory to verified nonprofits as easily as placing a standard e-commerce order.

• You get your pallet positions back immediately.
• Your clients get a clean tax write-off and stop complaining about holding costs.
• Your 3PL can white-label the service, charge a processing fee, and look like a hero.

Stop letting zombie inventory kill your warehouse utilization.

Book a call with the founder >

Peak season is showing up early. Plan your dock around June, not August.

If you've been pacing your staffing and storage plans to a normal calendar, here's your heads-up to move them forward. The Port of LA moved 840,165 TEUs in May, up 17% year over year, and director Gene Seroka is projecting that both June and July will clear 900,000 TEUs. Translation: the inbound wave is arriving weeks ahead of when you'd usually brace for it.

The reason isn't a roaring economy. It's importers grabbing what Seroka calls a "window of stability" and rushing cargo through while they can. With tariffs changing on a near-constant basis and energy costs swinging on Gulf headlines, companies are operating on short planning horizons and frontloading inventory the moment conditions allow. The National Retail Federation's Global Port Tracker sees the same trend: an early peak season, with the bump landing in June and July rather than the usual late-summer surge. It's the tariff-frontloading reflex we've watched all year, except this time the trigger is "move it before the next policy shock" rather than any one specific deadline.

The Gulf situation is the quiet co-author of all this. You may have seen the U.S. and Iran signed a memorandum of understanding to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, and that's real progress. But Seroka threw cold water on anyone expecting a fast snap-back: it'll take shipping lines months to normalize schedules, clear backlogs, and get things to "some semblance of normalcy." So the relief is coming, just not in time to change your Q3. He also flagged that some importers haven't yet absorbed the full hit from higher energy prices on the land side, meaning there's still a cost increase working its way through to your clients' invoices.

What this means for you: Two moves. First, if your inbound is coming from the West Coast, assume your busy stretch starts now, not in August. Pull your labor ramp and your space planning forward, because the cargo isn't waiting for the calendar. Second, have the volume conversation with your brands early; the same advice we gave back in Edition 45 about getting real Q3 and Q4 numbers instead of leaning on last year's. An early peak that gets pulled forward can also mean a softer back half if everyone frontloaded, so you want to know whether your clients are moving holiday inventory early or genuinely growing. Staffing for a peak that already happened is an expensive way to find out.

QUICK HITS

Cargofy raised $6 million to put a "digital employee" in your dispatch office. The Series A, led by u.ventures and Toloka.vc with Intercom co-founder Des Traynor along for the ride, funds a platform that plugs into 70-plus tools freight operators already use and automates the grind: emailing carriers, chasing documents, coordinating dispatch, all around the clock. The numbers Cargofy is throwing around are eye-catching: one dispatcher managing a fleet 10x the usual size, a 315-truck operation saving $83,000 a month. Treat the self-reported stats with appropriate salt, but the direction is clear.

SFO is spending over $300 million to automate its air cargo. San Francisco International is building a 310,000-square-foot, two-story automated cargo terminal, with the German specialist Lödige supplying three Elevating Transfer Vehicles that move cargo units vertically and horizontally simultaneously. The goal is faster turnarounds and the throughput to keep SFO competitive as a West Coast gateway. It opens in 2028, part of a broader air-freight modernization wave as hubs race to expand to meet rising e-commerce and value-dense cargo volumes.

Burlington is planting a 2-million-square-foot DC near the Port of Savannah. The off-price chain is adding a major East Coast replenishment hub in Ellabell, Georgia, on top of the nearly 2-million-square-foot automated DC it broke ground on in Arizona this spring. Burlington opens stores at a clip of roughly 100 a year, and its opportunistic, buy-it-when-you-see-it model places unusual emphasis on what happens inside the four walls. As their ops director put it, the back-of-house work is as important as the storefront, sometimes more. When merchandise shows up in random forms and quantities, the warehouse is where the treasure hunt actually gets built. (Read more)

DEI stances are quietly reshaping where people shop. New Human Rights Campaign research found roughly 72% of LGBTQ+ consumers say they're buying less from companies they see as pulling back on diversity commitments, with Target, Walmart, Amazon, Chick-Fil-A, and Home Depot most often named. On the flip side, about 70% say they reward companies they view as supportive, with Costco, Apple, and Kroger leading there. Why it lands on this desk: that's a $1.7 trillion consumer bloc, and several of the named names are brands whose fulfillment volume you may be touching. Shifts in where this group spends eventually show up as shifts in whose boxes move.
_______________________________________________________________________

That's all for this week. If you found this useful, consider subscribing.
(Your data will not be shared. Subscribers' data is strictly for sending out the weekly newsletter.)

Hey everyone,

If it's your first time reading one of my posts, my name is Menachem, and I have a weekly newsletter called Logistic Pulse that breaks down the top logistics news from the past week, so you're always up to date.

Let's jump into it.

UPS found the one corner of GLP-1 mania nobody was fighting over

We've spent two editions now on what Ozempic is doing to your apparel clients. Edition 45 covered the wardrobe boom, and Edition 49 covered the brutal returns wave as customers keep shrinking out of clothes they bought three weeks ago. This week, UPS reminded everyone there's a whole other GLP-1 logistics story, and it's a much happier one if you're on the right side of it.

UPS is investing $48 million in 27 temperature-controlled cross-dock facilities across the Americas, Europe, and Asia. The pitch is cold chain: drugs like Wegovy and Ozempic need strict refrigeration in transit, and with roughly 1 in 8 Americans now on a GLP-1, that's a tidal wave of temperature-sensitive volume that simply cannot afford to break custody. The market backs the bet. Temperature-sensitive biologics are projected to grow at an 8.3% clip through 2033, heading toward a $39 billion market. And the stakes aren't just commercial. The WHO estimates that up to half of global vaccines are wasted every year, a big chunk of that due to cold-chain failures.

The strategic read here is that UPS is doubling down on exactly the premium, defensible territory it's been retreating into. CEO Carol Tomé said healthcare hit its first-ever $3 billion revenue quarter in Q1 and has gained market share every year since 2021. This is the same playbook we flagged when Amazon opened its Supply Chain Services to everyone back in Edition 45: the carriers walking away from thin Amazon volume and planting flags in high-margin, high-complexity work that's hard to commoditize. Cold-chain pharma is about as hard to commoditize as logistics gets.

What this means for you: If you serve healthcare, biotech, or pharma brands, the demand signal just got louder, and the infrastructure spend says the big players expect it to keep climbing. This is also a reminder that's worth sitting with as Amazon keeps eating the standardized middle of the market. The work that requires real custody, real specialization, and real consequences for getting it wrong is the work that holds its margin. A pallet of t-shirts is a pallet of t-shirts. A pallet of biologics at the wrong temperature is a destroyed shipment and a patient who doesn't get treated. That gap is your lane.

Prime Day sale tells you everything about the consumer

Amazon has basically run out of people to sell Prime memberships to. Over 86% of online shoppers are already members, up from about 40 million U.S. consumers when Prime Day launched in 2015 to around 200 million now. When you've saturated the market, the growth game changes. You stop trying to add members and start squeezing more orders out of the ones you've got.

You can see that shift in what's on sale this year. Instead of the big-ticket electronics that defined early Prime Days, Amazon is pushing hot dogs, energy drinks, and K-beauty. Groceries and everyday essentials. These items make Amazon less money per sale, but that's the point: they're loss leaders designed to get you to open the app more often, which is where the real money is made later. It's the grocery-and-delivery battleground, and Amazon is far from alone in it. Nearly 60% of Prime members who plan to shop this week say they'll also check Walmart's competing sale, and Walmart+ keeps stacking on delivery perks to match.

There's a thread running under all this that we've been pulling on since Edition 48. This is the K-shaped, trade-down consumer showing up in Amazon's own strategy. When the squeezed half of the economy is buying hot dogs and energy drinks instead of TVs, the biggest retailer on earth restructures its marquee shopping event around hot dogs and energy drinks. The consumer told Amazon what they're buying, and Amazon listened.

What this means for you: If you fulfill for grocery, CPG, or everyday essentials brands, this is a tailwind. The whole retail apparatus is reorganizing around frequent, low-ticket, fast-delivery purchases, and that's volume flowing through fulfillment networks all year, not just on sale days. If your clients skew toward discretionary big-ticket goods, the same signal reads as a yellow light, the same one Whirlpool flashed back in Edition 48. Either way, by the time you read the next edition, you'll have four days of live Prime Day volume to tell you which way your book is actually leaning.

Tired of hosting a graveyard for your clients' dead inventory?

We all have that one brand. They’ve got 40 pallets of slow-moving or returned stock taking up premium rack space. They complain about storage fees every month, but they won't pull the trigger on liquidating it.

Stock fixes this. It’s a white-labeled platform that lets your clients donate their excess inventory to verified nonprofits as easily as placing a standard e-commerce order.

• You get your pallet positions back immediately.
• Your clients get a clean tax write-off and stop complaining about holding costs.
• Your 3PL can white-label the service, charge a processing fee, and look like a hero.

Stop letting zombie inventory kill your warehouse utilization.

Book a call with the founder >

Peak season is showing up early. Plan your dock around June, not August.

If you've been pacing your staffing and storage plans to a normal calendar, here's your heads-up to move them forward. The Port of LA moved 840,165 TEUs in May, up 17% year over year, and director Gene Seroka is projecting that both June and July will clear 900,000 TEUs. Translation: the inbound wave is arriving weeks ahead of when you'd usually brace for it.

The reason isn't a roaring economy. It's importers grabbing what Seroka calls a "window of stability" and rushing cargo through while they can. With tariffs changing on a near-constant basis and energy costs swinging on Gulf headlines, companies are operating on short planning horizons and frontloading inventory the moment conditions allow. The National Retail Federation's Global Port Tracker sees the same trend: an early peak season, with the bump landing in June and July rather than the usual late-summer surge. It's the tariff-frontloading reflex we've watched all year, except this time the trigger is "move it before the next policy shock" rather than any one specific deadline.

The Gulf situation is the quiet co-author of all this. You may have seen the U.S. and Iran signed a memorandum of understanding to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, and that's real progress. But Seroka threw cold water on anyone expecting a fast snap-back: it'll take shipping lines months to normalize schedules, clear backlogs, and get things to "some semblance of normalcy." So the relief is coming, just not in time to change your Q3. He also flagged that some importers haven't yet absorbed the full hit from higher energy prices on the land side, meaning there's still a cost increase working its way through to your clients' invoices.

What this means for you: Two moves. First, if your inbound is coming from the West Coast, assume your busy stretch starts now, not in August. Pull your labor ramp and your space planning forward, because the cargo isn't waiting for the calendar. Second, have the volume conversation with your brands early; the same advice we gave back in Edition 45 about getting real Q3 and Q4 numbers instead of leaning on last year's. An early peak that gets pulled forward can also mean a softer back half if everyone frontloaded, so you want to know whether your clients are moving holiday inventory early or genuinely growing. Staffing for a peak that already happened is an expensive way to find out.

QUICK HITS

Cargofy raised $6 million to put a "digital employee" in your dispatch office. The Series A, led by u.ventures and Toloka.vc with Intercom co-founder Des Traynor along for the ride, funds a platform that plugs into 70-plus tools freight operators already use and automates the grind: emailing carriers, chasing documents, coordinating dispatch, all around the clock. The numbers Cargofy is throwing around are eye-catching: one dispatcher managing a fleet 10x the usual size, a 315-truck operation saving $83,000 a month. Treat the self-reported stats with appropriate salt, but the direction is clear.

SFO is spending over $300 million to automate its air cargo. San Francisco International is building a 310,000-square-foot, two-story automated cargo terminal, with the German specialist Lödige supplying three Elevating Transfer Vehicles that move cargo units vertically and horizontally simultaneously. The goal is faster turnarounds and the throughput to keep SFO competitive as a West Coast gateway. It opens in 2028, part of a broader air-freight modernization wave as hubs race to expand to meet rising e-commerce and value-dense cargo volumes.

Burlington is planting a 2-million-square-foot DC near the Port of Savannah. The off-price chain is adding a major East Coast replenishment hub in Ellabell, Georgia, on top of the nearly 2-million-square-foot automated DC it broke ground on in Arizona this spring. Burlington opens stores at a clip of roughly 100 a year, and its opportunistic, buy-it-when-you-see-it model places unusual emphasis on what happens inside the four walls. As their ops director put it, the back-of-house work is as important as the storefront, sometimes more. When merchandise shows up in random forms and quantities, the warehouse is where the treasure hunt actually gets built. (Read more)

DEI stances are quietly reshaping where people shop. New Human Rights Campaign research found roughly 72% of LGBTQ+ consumers say they're buying less from companies they see as pulling back on diversity commitments, with Target, Walmart, Amazon, Chick-Fil-A, and Home Depot most often named. On the flip side, about 70% say they reward companies they view as supportive, with Costco, Apple, and Kroger leading there. Why it lands on this desk: that's a $1.7 trillion consumer bloc, and several of the named names are brands whose fulfillment volume you may be touching. Shifts in where this group spends eventually show up as shifts in whose boxes move.
_______________________________________________________________________

That's all for this week. If you found this useful, consider subscribing.
(Your data will not be shared. Subscribers' data is strictly for sending out the weekly newsletter.)

Hey everyone,

If it's your first time reading one of my posts, my name is Menachem, and I have a weekly newsletter called Logistic Pulse that breaks down the top logistics news from the past week, so you're always up to date.

Let's jump into it.

UPS found the one corner of GLP-1 mania nobody was fighting over

We've spent two editions now on what Ozempic is doing to your apparel clients. Edition 45 covered the wardrobe boom, and Edition 49 covered the brutal returns wave as customers keep shrinking out of clothes they bought three weeks ago. This week, UPS reminded everyone there's a whole other GLP-1 logistics story, and it's a much happier one if you're on the right side of it.

UPS is investing $48 million in 27 temperature-controlled cross-dock facilities across the Americas, Europe, and Asia. The pitch is cold chain: drugs like Wegovy and Ozempic need strict refrigeration in transit, and with roughly 1 in 8 Americans now on a GLP-1, that's a tidal wave of temperature-sensitive volume that simply cannot afford to break custody. The market backs the bet. Temperature-sensitive biologics are projected to grow at an 8.3% clip through 2033, heading toward a $39 billion market. And the stakes aren't just commercial. The WHO estimates that up to half of global vaccines are wasted every year, a big chunk of that due to cold-chain failures.

The strategic read here is that UPS is doubling down on exactly the premium, defensible territory it's been retreating into. CEO Carol Tomé said healthcare hit its first-ever $3 billion revenue quarter in Q1 and has gained market share every year since 2021. This is the same playbook we flagged when Amazon opened its Supply Chain Services to everyone back in Edition 45: the carriers walking away from thin Amazon volume and planting flags in high-margin, high-complexity work that's hard to commoditize. Cold-chain pharma is about as hard to commoditize as logistics gets.

What this means for you: If you serve healthcare, biotech, or pharma brands, the demand signal just got louder, and the infrastructure spend says the big players expect it to keep climbing. This is also a reminder that's worth sitting with as Amazon keeps eating the standardized middle of the market. The work that requires real custody, real specialization, and real consequences for getting it wrong is the work that holds its margin. A pallet of t-shirts is a pallet of t-shirts. A pallet of biologics at the wrong temperature is a destroyed shipment and a patient who doesn't get treated. That gap is your lane.

Prime Day sale tells you everything about the consumer

Amazon has basically run out of people to sell Prime memberships to. Over 86% of online shoppers are already members, up from about 40 million U.S. consumers when Prime Day launched in 2015 to around 200 million now. When you've saturated the market, the growth game changes. You stop trying to add members and start squeezing more orders out of the ones you've got.

You can see that shift in what's on sale this year. Instead of the big-ticket electronics that defined early Prime Days, Amazon is pushing hot dogs, energy drinks, and K-beauty. Groceries and everyday essentials. These items make Amazon less money per sale, but that's the point: they're loss leaders designed to get you to open the app more often, which is where the real money is made later. It's the grocery-and-delivery battleground, and Amazon is far from alone in it. Nearly 60% of Prime members who plan to shop this week say they'll also check Walmart's competing sale, and Walmart+ keeps stacking on delivery perks to match.

There's a thread running under all this that we've been pulling on since Edition 48. This is the K-shaped, trade-down consumer showing up in Amazon's own strategy. When the squeezed half of the economy is buying hot dogs and energy drinks instead of TVs, the biggest retailer on earth restructures its marquee shopping event around hot dogs and energy drinks. The consumer told Amazon what they're buying, and Amazon listened.

What this means for you: If you fulfill for grocery, CPG, or everyday essentials brands, this is a tailwind. The whole retail apparatus is reorganizing around frequent, low-ticket, fast-delivery purchases, and that's volume flowing through fulfillment networks all year, not just on sale days. If your clients skew toward discretionary big-ticket goods, the same signal reads as a yellow light, the same one Whirlpool flashed back in Edition 48. Either way, by the time you read the next edition, you'll have four days of live Prime Day volume to tell you which way your book is actually leaning.

Tired of hosting a graveyard for your clients' dead inventory?

We all have that one brand. They’ve got 40 pallets of slow-moving or returned stock taking up premium rack space. They complain about storage fees every month, but they won't pull the trigger on liquidating it.

Stock fixes this. It’s a white-labeled platform that lets your clients donate their excess inventory to verified nonprofits as easily as placing a standard e-commerce order.

• You get your pallet positions back immediately.
• Your clients get a clean tax write-off and stop complaining about holding costs.
• Your 3PL can white-label the service, charge a processing fee, and look like a hero.

Stop letting zombie inventory kill your warehouse utilization.

Book a call with the founder >

Peak season is showing up early. Plan your dock around June, not August.

If you've been pacing your staffing and storage plans to a normal calendar, here's your heads-up to move them forward. The Port of LA moved 840,165 TEUs in May, up 17% year over year, and director Gene Seroka is projecting that both June and July will clear 900,000 TEUs. Translation: the inbound wave is arriving weeks ahead of when you'd usually brace for it.

The reason isn't a roaring economy. It's importers grabbing what Seroka calls a "window of stability" and rushing cargo through while they can. With tariffs changing on a near-constant basis and energy costs swinging on Gulf headlines, companies are operating on short planning horizons and frontloading inventory the moment conditions allow. The National Retail Federation's Global Port Tracker sees the same trend: an early peak season, with the bump landing in June and July rather than the usual late-summer surge. It's the tariff-frontloading reflex we've watched all year, except this time the trigger is "move it before the next policy shock" rather than any one specific deadline.

The Gulf situation is the quiet co-author of all this. You may have seen the U.S. and Iran signed a memorandum of understanding to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, and that's real progress. But Seroka threw cold water on anyone expecting a fast snap-back: it'll take shipping lines months to normalize schedules, clear backlogs, and get things to "some semblance of normalcy." So the relief is coming, just not in time to change your Q3. He also flagged that some importers haven't yet absorbed the full hit from higher energy prices on the land side, meaning there's still a cost increase working its way through to your clients' invoices.

What this means for you: Two moves. First, if your inbound is coming from the West Coast, assume your busy stretch starts now, not in August. Pull your labor ramp and your space planning forward, because the cargo isn't waiting for the calendar. Second, have the volume conversation with your brands early; the same advice we gave back in Edition 45 about getting real Q3 and Q4 numbers instead of leaning on last year's. An early peak that gets pulled forward can also mean a softer back half if everyone frontloaded, so you want to know whether your clients are moving holiday inventory early or genuinely growing. Staffing for a peak that already happened is an expensive way to find out.

QUICK HITS

Cargofy raised $6 million to put a "digital employee" in your dispatch office. The Series A, led by u.ventures and Toloka.vc with Intercom co-founder Des Traynor along for the ride, funds a platform that plugs into 70-plus tools freight operators already use and automates the grind: emailing carriers, chasing documents, coordinating dispatch, all around the clock. The numbers Cargofy is throwing around are eye-catching: one dispatcher managing a fleet 10x the usual size, a 315-truck operation saving $83,000 a month. Treat the self-reported stats with appropriate salt, but the direction is clear.

SFO is spending over $300 million to automate its air cargo. San Francisco International is building a 310,000-square-foot, two-story automated cargo terminal, with the German specialist Lödige supplying three Elevating Transfer Vehicles that move cargo units vertically and horizontally simultaneously. The goal is faster turnarounds and the throughput to keep SFO competitive as a West Coast gateway. It opens in 2028, part of a broader air-freight modernization wave as hubs race to expand to meet rising e-commerce and value-dense cargo volumes.

Burlington is planting a 2-million-square-foot DC near the Port of Savannah. The off-price chain is adding a major East Coast replenishment hub in Ellabell, Georgia, on top of the nearly 2-million-square-foot automated DC it broke ground on in Arizona this spring. Burlington opens stores at a clip of roughly 100 a year, and its opportunistic, buy-it-when-you-see-it model places unusual emphasis on what happens inside the four walls. As their ops director put it, the back-of-house work is as important as the storefront, sometimes more. When merchandise shows up in random forms and quantities, the warehouse is where the treasure hunt actually gets built. (Read more)

DEI stances are quietly reshaping where people shop. New Human Rights Campaign research found roughly 72% of LGBTQ+ consumers say they're buying less from companies they see as pulling back on diversity commitments, with Target, Walmart, Amazon, Chick-Fil-A, and Home Depot most often named. On the flip side, about 70% say they reward companies they view as supportive, with Costco, Apple, and Kroger leading there. Why it lands on this desk: that's a $1.7 trillion consumer bloc, and several of the named names are brands whose fulfillment volume you may be touching. Shifts in where this group spends eventually show up as shifts in whose boxes move.
_______________________________________________________________________

That's all for this week. If you found this useful, consider subscribing.
(Your data will not be shared. Subscribers' data is strictly for sending out the weekly newsletter.)

Hey everyone,

If it's your first time reading one of my posts, my name is Menachem, and I have a weekly newsletter called Logistic Pulse that breaks down the top logistics news from the past week, so you're always up to date.

Let's jump into it.

UPS found the one corner of GLP-1 mania nobody was fighting over

We've spent two editions now on what Ozempic is doing to your apparel clients. Edition 45 covered the wardrobe boom, and Edition 49 covered the brutal returns wave as customers keep shrinking out of clothes they bought three weeks ago. This week, UPS reminded everyone there's a whole other GLP-1 logistics story, and it's a much happier one if you're on the right side of it.

UPS is investing $48 million in 27 temperature-controlled cross-dock facilities across the Americas, Europe, and Asia. The pitch is cold chain: drugs like Wegovy and Ozempic need strict refrigeration in transit, and with roughly 1 in 8 Americans now on a GLP-1, that's a tidal wave of temperature-sensitive volume that simply cannot afford to break custody. The market backs the bet. Temperature-sensitive biologics are projected to grow at an 8.3% clip through 2033, heading toward a $39 billion market. And the stakes aren't just commercial. The WHO estimates that up to half of global vaccines are wasted every year, a big chunk of that due to cold-chain failures.

The strategic read here is that UPS is doubling down on exactly the premium, defensible territory it's been retreating into. CEO Carol Tomé said healthcare hit its first-ever $3 billion revenue quarter in Q1 and has gained market share every year since 2021. This is the same playbook we flagged when Amazon opened its Supply Chain Services to everyone back in Edition 45: the carriers walking away from thin Amazon volume and planting flags in high-margin, high-complexity work that's hard to commoditize. Cold-chain pharma is about as hard to commoditize as logistics gets.

What this means for you: If you serve healthcare, biotech, or pharma brands, the demand signal just got louder, and the infrastructure spend says the big players expect it to keep climbing. This is also a reminder that's worth sitting with as Amazon keeps eating the standardized middle of the market. The work that requires real custody, real specialization, and real consequences for getting it wrong is the work that holds its margin. A pallet of t-shirts is a pallet of t-shirts. A pallet of biologics at the wrong temperature is a destroyed shipment and a patient who doesn't get treated. That gap is your lane.

Prime Day sale tells you everything about the consumer

Amazon has basically run out of people to sell Prime memberships to. Over 86% of online shoppers are already members, up from about 40 million U.S. consumers when Prime Day launched in 2015 to around 200 million now. When you've saturated the market, the growth game changes. You stop trying to add members and start squeezing more orders out of the ones you've got.

You can see that shift in what's on sale this year. Instead of the big-ticket electronics that defined early Prime Days, Amazon is pushing hot dogs, energy drinks, and K-beauty. Groceries and everyday essentials. These items make Amazon less money per sale, but that's the point: they're loss leaders designed to get you to open the app more often, which is where the real money is made later. It's the grocery-and-delivery battleground, and Amazon is far from alone in it. Nearly 60% of Prime members who plan to shop this week say they'll also check Walmart's competing sale, and Walmart+ keeps stacking on delivery perks to match.

There's a thread running under all this that we've been pulling on since Edition 48. This is the K-shaped, trade-down consumer showing up in Amazon's own strategy. When the squeezed half of the economy is buying hot dogs and energy drinks instead of TVs, the biggest retailer on earth restructures its marquee shopping event around hot dogs and energy drinks. The consumer told Amazon what they're buying, and Amazon listened.

What this means for you: If you fulfill for grocery, CPG, or everyday essentials brands, this is a tailwind. The whole retail apparatus is reorganizing around frequent, low-ticket, fast-delivery purchases, and that's volume flowing through fulfillment networks all year, not just on sale days. If your clients skew toward discretionary big-ticket goods, the same signal reads as a yellow light, the same one Whirlpool flashed back in Edition 48. Either way, by the time you read the next edition, you'll have four days of live Prime Day volume to tell you which way your book is actually leaning.

Tired of hosting a graveyard for your clients' dead inventory?

We all have that one brand. They’ve got 40 pallets of slow-moving or returned stock taking up premium rack space. They complain about storage fees every month, but they won't pull the trigger on liquidating it.

Stock fixes this. It’s a white-labeled platform that lets your clients donate their excess inventory to verified nonprofits as easily as placing a standard e-commerce order.

• You get your pallet positions back immediately.
• Your clients get a clean tax write-off and stop complaining about holding costs.
• Your 3PL can white-label the service, charge a processing fee, and look like a hero.

Stop letting zombie inventory kill your warehouse utilization.

Book a call with the founder >

Peak season is showing up early. Plan your dock around June, not August.

If you've been pacing your staffing and storage plans to a normal calendar, here's your heads-up to move them forward. The Port of LA moved 840,165 TEUs in May, up 17% year over year, and director Gene Seroka is projecting that both June and July will clear 900,000 TEUs. Translation: the inbound wave is arriving weeks ahead of when you'd usually brace for it.

The reason isn't a roaring economy. It's importers grabbing what Seroka calls a "window of stability" and rushing cargo through while they can. With tariffs changing on a near-constant basis and energy costs swinging on Gulf headlines, companies are operating on short planning horizons and frontloading inventory the moment conditions allow. The National Retail Federation's Global Port Tracker sees the same trend: an early peak season, with the bump landing in June and July rather than the usual late-summer surge. It's the tariff-frontloading reflex we've watched all year, except this time the trigger is "move it before the next policy shock" rather than any one specific deadline.

The Gulf situation is the quiet co-author of all this. You may have seen the U.S. and Iran signed a memorandum of understanding to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, and that's real progress. But Seroka threw cold water on anyone expecting a fast snap-back: it'll take shipping lines months to normalize schedules, clear backlogs, and get things to "some semblance of normalcy." So the relief is coming, just not in time to change your Q3. He also flagged that some importers haven't yet absorbed the full hit from higher energy prices on the land side, meaning there's still a cost increase working its way through to your clients' invoices.

What this means for you: Two moves. First, if your inbound is coming from the West Coast, assume your busy stretch starts now, not in August. Pull your labor ramp and your space planning forward, because the cargo isn't waiting for the calendar. Second, have the volume conversation with your brands early; the same advice we gave back in Edition 45 about getting real Q3 and Q4 numbers instead of leaning on last year's. An early peak that gets pulled forward can also mean a softer back half if everyone frontloaded, so you want to know whether your clients are moving holiday inventory early or genuinely growing. Staffing for a peak that already happened is an expensive way to find out.

QUICK HITS

Cargofy raised $6 million to put a "digital employee" in your dispatch office. The Series A, led by u.ventures and Toloka.vc with Intercom co-founder Des Traynor along for the ride, funds a platform that plugs into 70-plus tools freight operators already use and automates the grind: emailing carriers, chasing documents, coordinating dispatch, all around the clock. The numbers Cargofy is throwing around are eye-catching: one dispatcher managing a fleet 10x the usual size, a 315-truck operation saving $83,000 a month. Treat the self-reported stats with appropriate salt, but the direction is clear.

SFO is spending over $300 million to automate its air cargo. San Francisco International is building a 310,000-square-foot, two-story automated cargo terminal, with the German specialist Lödige supplying three Elevating Transfer Vehicles that move cargo units vertically and horizontally simultaneously. The goal is faster turnarounds and the throughput to keep SFO competitive as a West Coast gateway. It opens in 2028, part of a broader air-freight modernization wave as hubs race to expand to meet rising e-commerce and value-dense cargo volumes.

Burlington is planting a 2-million-square-foot DC near the Port of Savannah. The off-price chain is adding a major East Coast replenishment hub in Ellabell, Georgia, on top of the nearly 2-million-square-foot automated DC it broke ground on in Arizona this spring. Burlington opens stores at a clip of roughly 100 a year, and its opportunistic, buy-it-when-you-see-it model places unusual emphasis on what happens inside the four walls. As their ops director put it, the back-of-house work is as important as the storefront, sometimes more. When merchandise shows up in random forms and quantities, the warehouse is where the treasure hunt actually gets built. (Read more)

DEI stances are quietly reshaping where people shop. New Human Rights Campaign research found roughly 72% of LGBTQ+ consumers say they're buying less from companies they see as pulling back on diversity commitments, with Target, Walmart, Amazon, Chick-Fil-A, and Home Depot most often named. On the flip side, about 70% say they reward companies they view as supportive, with Costco, Apple, and Kroger leading there. Why it lands on this desk: that's a $1.7 trillion consumer bloc, and several of the named names are brands whose fulfillment volume you may be touching. Shifts in where this group spends eventually show up as shifts in whose boxes move.
_______________________________________________________________________

That's all for this week. If you found this useful, consider subscribing.
(Your data will not be shared. Subscribers' data is strictly for sending out the weekly newsletter.)

Warehouse Space Requirement (prospect is looking to sublease, not looking for any services)

Location: El Segundo, CA

Size: 5,000 sq ft

Timing: Ready to start immediately

Use: Light assembly of hardware and electrical components

Headcount: 1–3 people initially, scaling to ~10 as operations grow

Noise/Machinery: None for the first few months. Heavier machinery and associated noise expected afterward, so the space (and lease terms) should permit light industrial/assembly use, not just office or pure storage.

Materials: No health, safety, or hazmat products. Batteries on-site (worth flagging to landlords/brokers, since battery storage can trigger specific fire-code or insurance requirements even at small quantities).

Warehouse Space Requirement (prospect is looking to sublease, not looking for any services)

Location: El Segundo, CA

Size: 5,000 sq ft

Timing: Ready to start immediately

Use: Light assembly of hardware and electrical components

Headcount: 1–3 people initially, scaling to ~10 as operations grow

Noise/Machinery: None for the first few months. Heavier machinery and associated noise expected afterward, so the space (and lease terms) should permit light industrial/assembly use, not just office or pure storage.

Materials: No health, safety, or hazmat products. Batteries on-site (worth flagging to landlords/brokers, since battery storage can trigger specific fire-code or insurance requirements even at small quantities).

Hey everyone,

If it's your first time reading one of my posts, my name is Menachem, and I have a weekly newsletter called Logistic Pulse that breaks down the top logistics news from the past week, so you're always up to date.

Let's jump into it.

Amazon spooked the entire LTL sector last week. Nobody can quite agree on what it actually announced.

Amazon is once again spooking the logistics industry, this time targeting the less-than-truckload market, causing shares of companies like Saia, ArcBest, Old Dominion and XPO to fall.

Here's what makes this one fun, though. A week later, the smartest people in the LTL business still can't agree on what Amazon actually sold them.

The announcement itself sounded huge. Amazon said its LTL service, which used to only haul freight inbound to its own fulfillment centers, was "officially open for all businesses to any type of destination." Ship one to six pallets, ranging from 150 to 15,000 pounds, to your warehouse, stores, or distributors. Next-day pickup if you book by 5 pm, same-day with drop trailers, GPS tracking, electronic proof of delivery, the whole modern package. And to flex its muscle, Amazon pointed to a fleet of 80,000-plus trailers and roughly 24,000 intermodal containers.

Which is where the record scratched.

Because if you actually run LTL for a living, that number is a tell, not a flex. "What has 80,000 trailers got to do with LTL? And who needs intermodal containers for LTL?" asked Satish Jindel of SJ Consulting, who's been reading this sector for decades. The thing that actually makes an LTL carrier an LTL carrier isn't trailers. It's the terminal network, the dense web of cross-docks where freight gets broken apart, sorted, and reloaded. That's the barrier to entry everyone always said protected Old Dominion and Saia. And it's the one thing Amazon was conspicuously quiet about. When asked directly whether it had an LTL terminal network, Amazon said it contracts with carriers for pickup and delivery, has "terminals," and will add more this year. Its own coverage map shows clusters that look much more like a fulfillment footprint than an LTL one: five facilities around Indianapolis and three near Detroit. TD Cowen's Jason Seidl counted roughly 74 actual cross-dock facilities as of early 2025, which is not a national LTL network.

So Jindel's read is that Amazon isn't becoming an LTL carrier at all. It's setting up as a broker, leveraging its status as one of the biggest LTL shippers in the country to secure cheap capacity from real carriers and resell it. In other words, the company it's actually coming for isn't Old Dominion. It's CH Robinson and Echo. (Amazon pushed back hard, insisting the service is "asset-backed," runs on its own equipment, and uses dedicated LTL-trained drivers.)

What this means for you: Don't let the stock chart write your strategy. The market reacted to the word "LTL" and the eye-popping trailer count; the people who know the sector reacted to what was missing, a terminal network, and concluded this looks more like a brokerage play than a carrier invasion. If you broker freight, that's the version worth watching, because brokerage is exactly where Amazon's data and buying power do the most damage. If you move freight through asset-based LTL carriers, the near-term threat is smaller than the headlines, but file this next to everything else Amazon's done this year: it keeps announcing the destination years before it arrives, and the market keeps pricing in the trip the day of the press release.

The freight market finally turned. The catch is there's nobody left to drive.

If you've been hauling freight for the last four years, you've earned the right to a little celebration this week. The downturn is over. Carriers are saying it out loud now, which they don't do unless they mean it.

The Logistics Managers' Index clocked transportation prices rising in May at the fastest rate for any metric in the report's ten-year history. Dry-van spot rates for the first week of June were up about 52% year-over-year before fuel. Flatbed spot rates hit an all-time high, propped up by the data-center construction boom. Estes is adding to its fleet of 10,500-plus trucks and growing its driver pool. After four years of pain, that's a real turn.

But read the fine print, because it changes everything about how this recovery feels on the ground.

This is a supply-driven recovery, not a demand-driven one. Translation: freight isn't booming. Volumes are flat to barely up. What changed is the number of trucks chasing those loads has collapsed. Rates are rising not because there's suddenly a flood of stuff to move, but because there's suddenly nobody to move it.

Why did all those trucks disappear?

Part of it was the long grind. Rates cratered in 2022, hundreds of thousands of small carriers went under, and the survivors were squeezed by rising costs across the board. But the accelerant over the past year has been federal policy. The administration started enforcing English-language proficiency rules and choking off commercial licenses for many immigrant drivers, and the exodus picked up speed.

This week we got a vivid snapshot of exactly how that's playing out, state by state. Ohio is revoking the licenses of about 1,200 foreign truckers and has stopped issuing non-domiciled CDLs entirely. Roughly 5,000 drivers holding those licenses are getting either a revocation notice or a "valid until it expires, then you're done" letter. The state was crystal clear that it has no plans to ever resume issuing them. Oregon yanked credentials from 900 foreign truckers in March, and the list goes on and on.

Stack these up, and the freight recovery starts to look less like a rebound and more like a supply shock with a federal policy engine behind it. The drivers aren't coming back because, in a growing number of states, they're not legally allowed to.

So what fills the gap? Here's the third piece:

PepsiCo now operates 35 driverless trucks on public roads in Arizona, hauling products between plants, warehouses, and stores. It's the first major US consumer-goods company to fess up to large-scale autonomous trucking on public roads. The trucks, built by the autonomy company Gatik, have five more running in Texas and one in Arkansas.

Autonomy lets the company grow the business without adding as many employees. The driverless trucks do best on short, repetitive, back-and-forth runs, the bottling-plant-to-storage shuttle, which is exactly the kind of route a freshly-licensed human driver used to cover.

Put all three together, and you've got a clean cause-and-effect chain. Policy pulls drivers out of the market. The driver shortage tightens capacity and lifts rates, which is most of why the "recovery" exists at all. And the tighter that human driver pool gets, the more attractive the truck that doesn't need a license, a visa, or a lunch break starts to look.

What this means for you: Enjoy the rate environment, but understand what it actually is. If your carrier partners are quoting you higher because capacity is tight rather than because demand is roaring, that's a more fragile floor than it looks. If the Fed raises rates, the demand side of trucking gets shakier, and a supply-driven recovery has little cushion from demand.

Trump says he might let USMCA lapse. The whole nearshoring trade is built on it.

Remember the Mexico story from Edition 49? America swapped China for Mexico without building a single factory, with the Interoceanic Corridor coming online and logistics providers planting flags in Puebla and betting on geography over policy?

Well, President Trump told reporters he may not renew USMCA, the free-trade pact he himself signed in his first term to replace NAFTA. He added the US doesn't need Canada's cars, lumber, or energy, or anything from Mexico, and that both countries have to treat the US better.

The USMCA is set to run through 2036, but it is subject to a mandatory joint review on July 1. If all three countries reaffirm, it locks in for another 16 years. If anyone balks, the agreement drops into a cycle of annual reviews, which is policy-speak for "a decade of uncertainty hanging over every cross-border supply chain decision." Canada has been publicly pushing for the clean 16-year renewal. Negotiations were set to start today in Washington.

Speaking about tariffs, a federal appeals court ruled Thursday that the administration can keep collecting its 10% worldwide tariff while the legal fight continues, finding the case "likely to succeed on the merits." That's the Section 122 tariff Trump rolled out after the Supreme Court struck down the broader IEEPA tariffs in February. It's set to expire July 24, and Section 122 caps you at 150 days before Congress has to weigh in.

What this means for you: The Mexico nearshoring bet isn't dead, and the Interoceanic Corridor concrete doesn't un-pour itself because of a press conference. But if you or your clients have been routing investment south on the assumption that the USMCA is a permanent fixture, July has just become a month worth watching closely. If your cross-border strategy depends on the agreement itself rather than the map in general, build in a contingency before the July 1 review.

QUICK HITS

A German robotics startup just raised more than most countries' defense budgets. NEURA Robotics raised a Series C of up to $1.4 billion to build what it's calling a "Physical AI" platform, featuring cognitive robots and humanoids that learn and work in the real world. The investor list: Amazon, NVIDIA, Qualcomm, Bosch, Schaeffler, the European Investment Bank, and Tether all wrote checks. We've watched the warehouse-automation money pile up all spring, from Locus grabbing Nexera's grasping tech to AIP buying Honeywell's warehouse unit. This one's bigger and broader, aimed at humanoids that work beside people rather than bolted-down arms. When Amazon and NVIDIA are both on the same cap table, it's worth noting where the smart money thinks the warehouse floor is heading.

Mercury bought King Courier in a deal that's a quiet masterclass in why owners sell to the right buyer. Mercury acquired King Courier, a Northern California logistics provider serving healthcare, biotech, and legal clients, thereby expanding its on-the-ground footprint in the San Francisco life sciences corridor. King's roughly 30 drivers and dispatchers get plugged into Mercury's cold-chain and international network. The interesting part is the why. King's owner, Chris Snell, was planning his retirement and explicitly chose Mercury because it isn't private-equity-owned and, in his words, is in it for the long run. This one's a reminder that for a lot of founder-owned 3PLs, who buys you matters as much as the multiple, especially when your name's been on the door for decades.

Everybody wants a supply chain person who can also do AI. Almost nobody exists. Gartner found that demand for supply chain roles requiring AI skills jumped 387% from Q1 2023 to Q1 2026, outpacing AI-skill demand across the broader labor market and outpacing supply chain hiring overall. The gap is widening faster than anyone can hire their way out of it, which means higher pay and longer searches for anyone hunting that rare combination of supply chain fluency and AI proficiency. The tech is arriving faster than the people who can run it.

MARK YOUR CALENDAR

Amazon Prime Day is next week. Running Tuesday through Friday (June 23-26). This is the first time Amazon has yanked its giant mid-year sales spike out of July and dropped it into the back end of Q2. If you haven't already pressure-tested your labor plan for next week, today's the day.

Deposco is hosting a free webinar Thursday, June 18, on how 3PLs are using client portals to surface account profitability, worth the hour if you're in this space. Reserve Your Spot →

_______________________________________________________________________

That's all for this week. If you found this useful, consider subscribing.
(Your data will not be shared. Subscribers' data is strictly for sending out the weekly newsletter.)

Hey everyone,

If it's your first time reading one of my posts, my name is Menachem, and I have a weekly newsletter called Logistic Pulse that breaks down the top logistics news from the past week, so you're always up to date.

Let's jump into it.

Amazon spooked the entire LTL sector last week. Nobody can quite agree on what it actually announced.

Amazon is once again spooking the logistics industry, this time targeting the less-than-truckload market, causing shares of companies like Saia, ArcBest, Old Dominion and XPO to fall.

Here's what makes this one fun, though. A week later, the smartest people in the LTL business still can't agree on what Amazon actually sold them.

The announcement itself sounded huge. Amazon said its LTL service, which used to only haul freight inbound to its own fulfillment centers, was "officially open for all businesses to any type of destination." Ship one to six pallets, ranging from 150 to 15,000 pounds, to your warehouse, stores, or distributors. Next-day pickup if you book by 5 pm, same-day with drop trailers, GPS tracking, electronic proof of delivery, the whole modern package. And to flex its muscle, Amazon pointed to a fleet of 80,000-plus trailers and roughly 24,000 intermodal containers.

Which is where the record scratched.

Because if you actually run LTL for a living, that number is a tell, not a flex. "What has 80,000 trailers got to do with LTL? And who needs intermodal containers for LTL?" asked Satish Jindel of SJ Consulting, who's been reading this sector for decades. The thing that actually makes an LTL carrier an LTL carrier isn't trailers. It's the terminal network, the dense web of cross-docks where freight gets broken apart, sorted, and reloaded. That's the barrier to entry everyone always said protected Old Dominion and Saia. And it's the one thing Amazon was conspicuously quiet about. When asked directly whether it had an LTL terminal network, Amazon said it contracts with carriers for pickup and delivery, has "terminals," and will add more this year. Its own coverage map shows clusters that look much more like a fulfillment footprint than an LTL one: five facilities around Indianapolis and three near Detroit. TD Cowen's Jason Seidl counted roughly 74 actual cross-dock facilities as of early 2025, which is not a national LTL network.

So Jindel's read is that Amazon isn't becoming an LTL carrier at all. It's setting up as a broker, leveraging its status as one of the biggest LTL shippers in the country to secure cheap capacity from real carriers and resell it. In other words, the company it's actually coming for isn't Old Dominion. It's CH Robinson and Echo. (Amazon pushed back hard, insisting the service is "asset-backed," runs on its own equipment, and uses dedicated LTL-trained drivers.)

What this means for you: Don't let the stock chart write your strategy. The market reacted to the word "LTL" and the eye-popping trailer count; the people who know the sector reacted to what was missing, a terminal network, and concluded this looks more like a brokerage play than a carrier invasion. If you broker freight, that's the version worth watching, because brokerage is exactly where Amazon's data and buying power do the most damage. If you move freight through asset-based LTL carriers, the near-term threat is smaller than the headlines, but file this next to everything else Amazon's done this year: it keeps announcing the destination years before it arrives, and the market keeps pricing in the trip the day of the press release.

The freight market finally turned. The catch is there's nobody left to drive.

If you've been hauling freight for the last four years, you've earned the right to a little celebration this week. The downturn is over. Carriers are saying it out loud now, which they don't do unless they mean it.

The Logistics Managers' Index clocked transportation prices rising in May at the fastest rate for any metric in the report's ten-year history. Dry-van spot rates for the first week of June were up about 52% year-over-year before fuel. Flatbed spot rates hit an all-time high, propped up by the data-center construction boom. Estes is adding to its fleet of 10,500-plus trucks and growing its driver pool. After four years of pain, that's a real turn.

But read the fine print, because it changes everything about how this recovery feels on the ground.

This is a supply-driven recovery, not a demand-driven one. Translation: freight isn't booming. Volumes are flat to barely up. What changed is the number of trucks chasing those loads has collapsed. Rates are rising not because there's suddenly a flood of stuff to move, but because there's suddenly nobody to move it.

Why did all those trucks disappear?

Part of it was the long grind. Rates cratered in 2022, hundreds of thousands of small carriers went under, and the survivors were squeezed by rising costs across the board. But the accelerant over the past year has been federal policy. The administration started enforcing English-language proficiency rules and choking off commercial licenses for many immigrant drivers, and the exodus picked up speed.

This week we got a vivid snapshot of exactly how that's playing out, state by state. Ohio is revoking the licenses of about 1,200 foreign truckers and has stopped issuing non-domiciled CDLs entirely. Roughly 5,000 drivers holding those licenses are getting either a revocation notice or a "valid until it expires, then you're done" letter. The state was crystal clear that it has no plans to ever resume issuing them. Oregon yanked credentials from 900 foreign truckers in March, and the list goes on and on.

Stack these up, and the freight recovery starts to look less like a rebound and more like a supply shock with a federal policy engine behind it. The drivers aren't coming back because, in a growing number of states, they're not legally allowed to.

So what fills the gap? Here's the third piece:

PepsiCo now operates 35 driverless trucks on public roads in Arizona, hauling products between plants, warehouses, and stores. It's the first major US consumer-goods company to fess up to large-scale autonomous trucking on public roads. The trucks, built by the autonomy company Gatik, have five more running in Texas and one in Arkansas.

Autonomy lets the company grow the business without adding as many employees. The driverless trucks do best on short, repetitive, back-and-forth runs, the bottling-plant-to-storage shuttle, which is exactly the kind of route a freshly-licensed human driver used to cover.

Put all three together, and you've got a clean cause-and-effect chain. Policy pulls drivers out of the market. The driver shortage tightens capacity and lifts rates, which is most of why the "recovery" exists at all. And the tighter that human driver pool gets, the more attractive the truck that doesn't need a license, a visa, or a lunch break starts to look.

What this means for you: Enjoy the rate environment, but understand what it actually is. If your carrier partners are quoting you higher because capacity is tight rather than because demand is roaring, that's a more fragile floor than it looks. If the Fed raises rates, the demand side of trucking gets shakier, and a supply-driven recovery has little cushion from demand.

Trump says he might let USMCA lapse. The whole nearshoring trade is built on it.

Remember the Mexico story from Edition 49? America swapped China for Mexico without building a single factory, with the Interoceanic Corridor coming online and logistics providers planting flags in Puebla and betting on geography over policy?

Well, President Trump told reporters he may not renew USMCA, the free-trade pact he himself signed in his first term to replace NAFTA. He added the US doesn't need Canada's cars, lumber, or energy, or anything from Mexico, and that both countries have to treat the US better.

The USMCA is set to run through 2036, but it is subject to a mandatory joint review on July 1. If all three countries reaffirm, it locks in for another 16 years. If anyone balks, the agreement drops into a cycle of annual reviews, which is policy-speak for "a decade of uncertainty hanging over every cross-border supply chain decision." Canada has been publicly pushing for the clean 16-year renewal. Negotiations were set to start today in Washington.

Speaking about tariffs, a federal appeals court ruled Thursday that the administration can keep collecting its 10% worldwide tariff while the legal fight continues, finding the case "likely to succeed on the merits." That's the Section 122 tariff Trump rolled out after the Supreme Court struck down the broader IEEPA tariffs in February. It's set to expire July 24, and Section 122 caps you at 150 days before Congress has to weigh in.

What this means for you: The Mexico nearshoring bet isn't dead, and the Interoceanic Corridor concrete doesn't un-pour itself because of a press conference. But if you or your clients have been routing investment south on the assumption that the USMCA is a permanent fixture, July has just become a month worth watching closely. If your cross-border strategy depends on the agreement itself rather than the map in general, build in a contingency before the July 1 review.

QUICK HITS

A German robotics startup just raised more than most countries' defense budgets. NEURA Robotics raised a Series C of up to $1.4 billion to build what it's calling a "Physical AI" platform, featuring cognitive robots and humanoids that learn and work in the real world. The investor list: Amazon, NVIDIA, Qualcomm, Bosch, Schaeffler, the European Investment Bank, and Tether all wrote checks. We've watched the warehouse-automation money pile up all spring, from Locus grabbing Nexera's grasping tech to AIP buying Honeywell's warehouse unit. This one's bigger and broader, aimed at humanoids that work beside people rather than bolted-down arms. When Amazon and NVIDIA are both on the same cap table, it's worth noting where the smart money thinks the warehouse floor is heading.

Mercury bought King Courier in a deal that's a quiet masterclass in why owners sell to the right buyer. Mercury acquired King Courier, a Northern California logistics provider serving healthcare, biotech, and legal clients, thereby expanding its on-the-ground footprint in the San Francisco life sciences corridor. King's roughly 30 drivers and dispatchers get plugged into Mercury's cold-chain and international network. The interesting part is the why. King's owner, Chris Snell, was planning his retirement and explicitly chose Mercury because it isn't private-equity-owned and, in his words, is in it for the long run. This one's a reminder that for a lot of founder-owned 3PLs, who buys you matters as much as the multiple, especially when your name's been on the door for decades.

Everybody wants a supply chain person who can also do AI. Almost nobody exists. Gartner found that demand for supply chain roles requiring AI skills jumped 387% from Q1 2023 to Q1 2026, outpacing AI-skill demand across the broader labor market and outpacing supply chain hiring overall. The gap is widening faster than anyone can hire their way out of it, which means higher pay and longer searches for anyone hunting that rare combination of supply chain fluency and AI proficiency. The tech is arriving faster than the people who can run it.

MARK YOUR CALENDAR

Amazon Prime Day is next week. Running Tuesday through Friday (June 23-26). This is the first time Amazon has yanked its giant mid-year sales spike out of July and dropped it into the back end of Q2. If you haven't already pressure-tested your labor plan for next week, today's the day.

Deposco is hosting a free webinar Thursday, June 18, on how 3PLs are using client portals to surface account profitability, worth the hour if you're in this space. Reserve Your Spot →

_______________________________________________________________________

That's all for this week. If you found this useful, consider subscribing.
(Your data will not be shared. Subscribers' data is strictly for sending out the weekly newsletter.)

Hey everyone,

If it's your first time reading one of my posts, my name is Menachem, and I have a weekly newsletter called Logistic Pulse that breaks down the top logistics news from the past week, so you're always up to date.

Let's jump into it.

Amazon spooked the entire LTL sector last week. Nobody can quite agree on what it actually announced.

Amazon is once again spooking the logistics industry, this time targeting the less-than-truckload market, causing shares of companies like Saia, ArcBest, Old Dominion and XPO to fall.

Here's what makes this one fun, though. A week later, the smartest people in the LTL business still can't agree on what Amazon actually sold them.

The announcement itself sounded huge. Amazon said its LTL service, which used to only haul freight inbound to its own fulfillment centers, was "officially open for all businesses to any type of destination." Ship one to six pallets, ranging from 150 to 15,000 pounds, to your warehouse, stores, or distributors. Next-day pickup if you book by 5 pm, same-day with drop trailers, GPS tracking, electronic proof of delivery, the whole modern package. And to flex its muscle, Amazon pointed to a fleet of 80,000-plus trailers and roughly 24,000 intermodal containers.

Which is where the record scratched.

Because if you actually run LTL for a living, that number is a tell, not a flex. "What has 80,000 trailers got to do with LTL? And who needs intermodal containers for LTL?" asked Satish Jindel of SJ Consulting, who's been reading this sector for decades. The thing that actually makes an LTL carrier an LTL carrier isn't trailers. It's the terminal network, the dense web of cross-docks where freight gets broken apart, sorted, and reloaded. That's the barrier to entry everyone always said protected Old Dominion and Saia. And it's the one thing Amazon was conspicuously quiet about. When asked directly whether it had an LTL terminal network, Amazon said it contracts with carriers for pickup and delivery, has "terminals," and will add more this year. Its own coverage map shows clusters that look much more like a fulfillment footprint than an LTL one: five facilities around Indianapolis and three near Detroit. TD Cowen's Jason Seidl counted roughly 74 actual cross-dock facilities as of early 2025, which is not a national LTL network.

So Jindel's read is that Amazon isn't becoming an LTL carrier at all. It's setting up as a broker, leveraging its status as one of the biggest LTL shippers in the country to secure cheap capacity from real carriers and resell it. In other words, the company it's actually coming for isn't Old Dominion. It's CH Robinson and Echo. (Amazon pushed back hard, insisting the service is "asset-backed," runs on its own equipment, and uses dedicated LTL-trained drivers.)

What this means for you: Don't let the stock chart write your strategy. The market reacted to the word "LTL" and the eye-popping trailer count; the people who know the sector reacted to what was missing, a terminal network, and concluded this looks more like a brokerage play than a carrier invasion. If you broker freight, that's the version worth watching, because brokerage is exactly where Amazon's data and buying power do the most damage. If you move freight through asset-based LTL carriers, the near-term threat is smaller than the headlines, but file this next to everything else Amazon's done this year: it keeps announcing the destination years before it arrives, and the market keeps pricing in the trip the day of the press release.

The freight market finally turned. The catch is there's nobody left to drive.

If you've been hauling freight for the last four years, you've earned the right to a little celebration this week. The downturn is over. Carriers are saying it out loud now, which they don't do unless they mean it.

The Logistics Managers' Index clocked transportation prices rising in May at the fastest rate for any metric in the report's ten-year history. Dry-van spot rates for the first week of June were up about 52% year-over-year before fuel. Flatbed spot rates hit an all-time high, propped up by the data-center construction boom. Estes is adding to its fleet of 10,500-plus trucks and growing its driver pool. After four years of pain, that's a real turn.

But read the fine print, because it changes everything about how this recovery feels on the ground.

This is a supply-driven recovery, not a demand-driven one. Translation: freight isn't booming. Volumes are flat to barely up. What changed is the number of trucks chasing those loads has collapsed. Rates are rising not because there's suddenly a flood of stuff to move, but because there's suddenly nobody to move it.

Why did all those trucks disappear?

Part of it was the long grind. Rates cratered in 2022, hundreds of thousands of small carriers went under, and the survivors were squeezed by rising costs across the board. But the accelerant over the past year has been federal policy. The administration started enforcing English-language proficiency rules and choking off commercial licenses for many immigrant drivers, and the exodus picked up speed.

This week we got a vivid snapshot of exactly how that's playing out, state by state. Ohio is revoking the licenses of about 1,200 foreign truckers and has stopped issuing non-domiciled CDLs entirely. Roughly 5,000 drivers holding those licenses are getting either a revocation notice or a "valid until it expires, then you're done" letter. The state was crystal clear that it has no plans to ever resume issuing them. Oregon yanked credentials from 900 foreign truckers in March, and the list goes on and on.

Stack these up, and the freight recovery starts to look less like a rebound and more like a supply shock with a federal policy engine behind it. The drivers aren't coming back because, in a growing number of states, they're not legally allowed to.

So what fills the gap? Here's the third piece:

PepsiCo now operates 35 driverless trucks on public roads in Arizona, hauling products between plants, warehouses, and stores. It's the first major US consumer-goods company to fess up to large-scale autonomous trucking on public roads. The trucks, built by the autonomy company Gatik, have five more running in Texas and one in Arkansas.

Autonomy lets the company grow the business without adding as many employees. The driverless trucks do best on short, repetitive, back-and-forth runs, the bottling-plant-to-storage shuttle, which is exactly the kind of route a freshly-licensed human driver used to cover.

Put all three together, and you've got a clean cause-and-effect chain. Policy pulls drivers out of the market. The driver shortage tightens capacity and lifts rates, which is most of why the "recovery" exists at all. And the tighter that human driver pool gets, the more attractive the truck that doesn't need a license, a visa, or a lunch break starts to look.

What this means for you: Enjoy the rate environment, but understand what it actually is. If your carrier partners are quoting you higher because capacity is tight rather than because demand is roaring, that's a more fragile floor than it looks. If the Fed raises rates, the demand side of trucking gets shakier, and a supply-driven recovery has little cushion from demand.

Trump says he might let USMCA lapse. The whole nearshoring trade is built on it.

Remember the Mexico story from Edition 49? America swapped China for Mexico without building a single factory, with the Interoceanic Corridor coming online and logistics providers planting flags in Puebla and betting on geography over policy?

Well, President Trump told reporters he may not renew USMCA, the free-trade pact he himself signed in his first term to replace NAFTA. He added the US doesn't need Canada's cars, lumber, or energy, or anything from Mexico, and that both countries have to treat the US better.

The USMCA is set to run through 2036, but it is subject to a mandatory joint review on July 1. If all three countries reaffirm, it locks in for another 16 years. If anyone balks, the agreement drops into a cycle of annual reviews, which is policy-speak for "a decade of uncertainty hanging over every cross-border supply chain decision." Canada has been publicly pushing for the clean 16-year renewal. Negotiations were set to start today in Washington.

Speaking about tariffs, a federal appeals court ruled Thursday that the administration can keep collecting its 10% worldwide tariff while the legal fight continues, finding the case "likely to succeed on the merits." That's the Section 122 tariff Trump rolled out after the Supreme Court struck down the broader IEEPA tariffs in February. It's set to expire July 24, and Section 122 caps you at 150 days before Congress has to weigh in.

What this means for you: The Mexico nearshoring bet isn't dead, and the Interoceanic Corridor concrete doesn't un-pour itself because of a press conference. But if you or your clients have been routing investment south on the assumption that the USMCA is a permanent fixture, July has just become a month worth watching closely. If your cross-border strategy depends on the agreement itself rather than the map in general, build in a contingency before the July 1 review.

QUICK HITS

A German robotics startup just raised more than most countries' defense budgets. NEURA Robotics raised a Series C of up to $1.4 billion to build what it's calling a "Physical AI" platform, featuring cognitive robots and humanoids that learn and work in the real world. The investor list: Amazon, NVIDIA, Qualcomm, Bosch, Schaeffler, the European Investment Bank, and Tether all wrote checks. We've watched the warehouse-automation money pile up all spring, from Locus grabbing Nexera's grasping tech to AIP buying Honeywell's warehouse unit. This one's bigger and broader, aimed at humanoids that work beside people rather than bolted-down arms. When Amazon and NVIDIA are both on the same cap table, it's worth noting where the smart money thinks the warehouse floor is heading.

Mercury bought King Courier in a deal that's a quiet masterclass in why owners sell to the right buyer. Mercury acquired King Courier, a Northern California logistics provider serving healthcare, biotech, and legal clients, thereby expanding its on-the-ground footprint in the San Francisco life sciences corridor. King's roughly 30 drivers and dispatchers get plugged into Mercury's cold-chain and international network. The interesting part is the why. King's owner, Chris Snell, was planning his retirement and explicitly chose Mercury because it isn't private-equity-owned and, in his words, is in it for the long run. This one's a reminder that for a lot of founder-owned 3PLs, who buys you matters as much as the multiple, especially when your name's been on the door for decades.

Everybody wants a supply chain person who can also do AI. Almost nobody exists. Gartner found that demand for supply chain roles requiring AI skills jumped 387% from Q1 2023 to Q1 2026, outpacing AI-skill demand across the broader labor market and outpacing supply chain hiring overall. The gap is widening faster than anyone can hire their way out of it, which means higher pay and longer searches for anyone hunting that rare combination of supply chain fluency and AI proficiency. The tech is arriving faster than the people who can run it.

MARK YOUR CALENDAR

Amazon Prime Day is next week. Running Tuesday through Friday (June 23-26). This is the first time Amazon has yanked its giant mid-year sales spike out of July and dropped it into the back end of Q2. If you haven't already pressure-tested your labor plan for next week, today's the day.

Deposco is hosting a free webinar Thursday, June 18, on how 3PLs are using client portals to surface account profitability, worth the hour if you're in this space. Reserve Your Spot →

_______________________________________________________________________

That's all for this week. If you found this useful, consider subscribing.
(Your data will not be shared. Subscribers' data is strictly for sending out the weekly newsletter.)

Hey everyone,

If it's your first time reading one of my posts, my name is Menachem, and I have a weekly newsletter called Logistic Pulse that breaks down the top logistics news from the past week, so you're always up to date.

Let's jump into it.

Amazon spooked the entire LTL sector last week. Nobody can quite agree on what it actually announced.

Amazon is once again spooking the logistics industry, this time targeting the less-than-truckload market, causing shares of companies like Saia, ArcBest, Old Dominion and XPO to fall.

Here's what makes this one fun, though. A week later, the smartest people in the LTL business still can't agree on what Amazon actually sold them.

The announcement itself sounded huge. Amazon said its LTL service, which used to only haul freight inbound to its own fulfillment centers, was "officially open for all businesses to any type of destination." Ship one to six pallets, ranging from 150 to 15,000 pounds, to your warehouse, stores, or distributors. Next-day pickup if you book by 5 pm, same-day with drop trailers, GPS tracking, electronic proof of delivery, the whole modern package. And to flex its muscle, Amazon pointed to a fleet of 80,000-plus trailers and roughly 24,000 intermodal containers.

Which is where the record scratched.

Because if you actually run LTL for a living, that number is a tell, not a flex. "What has 80,000 trailers got to do with LTL? And who needs intermodal containers for LTL?" asked Satish Jindel of SJ Consulting, who's been reading this sector for decades. The thing that actually makes an LTL carrier an LTL carrier isn't trailers. It's the terminal network, the dense web of cross-docks where freight gets broken apart, sorted, and reloaded. That's the barrier to entry everyone always said protected Old Dominion and Saia. And it's the one thing Amazon was conspicuously quiet about. When asked directly whether it had an LTL terminal network, Amazon said it contracts with carriers for pickup and delivery, has "terminals," and will add more this year. Its own coverage map shows clusters that look much more like a fulfillment footprint than an LTL one: five facilities around Indianapolis and three near Detroit. TD Cowen's Jason Seidl counted roughly 74 actual cross-dock facilities as of early 2025, which is not a national LTL network.

So Jindel's read is that Amazon isn't becoming an LTL carrier at all. It's setting up as a broker, leveraging its status as one of the biggest LTL shippers in the country to secure cheap capacity from real carriers and resell it. In other words, the company it's actually coming for isn't Old Dominion. It's CH Robinson and Echo. (Amazon pushed back hard, insisting the service is "asset-backed," runs on its own equipment, and uses dedicated LTL-trained drivers.)

What this means for you: Don't let the stock chart write your strategy. The market reacted to the word "LTL" and the eye-popping trailer count; the people who know the sector reacted to what was missing, a terminal network, and concluded this looks more like a brokerage play than a carrier invasion. If you broker freight, that's the version worth watching, because brokerage is exactly where Amazon's data and buying power do the most damage. If you move freight through asset-based LTL carriers, the near-term threat is smaller than the headlines, but file this next to everything else Amazon's done this year: it keeps announcing the destination years before it arrives, and the market keeps pricing in the trip the day of the press release.

The freight market finally turned. The catch is there's nobody left to drive.

If you've been hauling freight for the last four years, you've earned the right to a little celebration this week. The downturn is over. Carriers are saying it out loud now, which they don't do unless they mean it.

The Logistics Managers' Index clocked transportation prices rising in May at the fastest rate for any metric in the report's ten-year history. Dry-van spot rates for the first week of June were up about 52% year-over-year before fuel. Flatbed spot rates hit an all-time high, propped up by the data-center construction boom. Estes is adding to its fleet of 10,500-plus trucks and growing its driver pool. After four years of pain, that's a real turn.

But read the fine print, because it changes everything about how this recovery feels on the ground.

This is a supply-driven recovery, not a demand-driven one. Translation: freight isn't booming. Volumes are flat to barely up. What changed is the number of trucks chasing those loads has collapsed. Rates are rising not because there's suddenly a flood of stuff to move, but because there's suddenly nobody to move it.

Why did all those trucks disappear?

Part of it was the long grind. Rates cratered in 2022, hundreds of thousands of small carriers went under, and the survivors were squeezed by rising costs across the board. But the accelerant over the past year has been federal policy. The administration started enforcing English-language proficiency rules and choking off commercial licenses for many immigrant drivers, and the exodus picked up speed.

This week we got a vivid snapshot of exactly how that's playing out, state by state. Ohio is revoking the licenses of about 1,200 foreign truckers and has stopped issuing non-domiciled CDLs entirely. Roughly 5,000 drivers holding those licenses are getting either a revocation notice or a "valid until it expires, then you're done" letter. The state was crystal clear that it has no plans to ever resume issuing them. Oregon yanked credentials from 900 foreign truckers in March, and the list goes on and on.

Stack these up, and the freight recovery starts to look less like a rebound and more like a supply shock with a federal policy engine behind it. The drivers aren't coming back because, in a growing number of states, they're not legally allowed to.

So what fills the gap? Here's the third piece:

PepsiCo now operates 35 driverless trucks on public roads in Arizona, hauling products between plants, warehouses, and stores. It's the first major US consumer-goods company to fess up to large-scale autonomous trucking on public roads. The trucks, built by the autonomy company Gatik, have five more running in Texas and one in Arkansas.

Autonomy lets the company grow the business without adding as many employees. The driverless trucks do best on short, repetitive, back-and-forth runs, the bottling-plant-to-storage shuttle, which is exactly the kind of route a freshly-licensed human driver used to cover.

Put all three together, and you've got a clean cause-and-effect chain. Policy pulls drivers out of the market. The driver shortage tightens capacity and lifts rates, which is most of why the "recovery" exists at all. And the tighter that human driver pool gets, the more attractive the truck that doesn't need a license, a visa, or a lunch break starts to look.

What this means for you: Enjoy the rate environment, but understand what it actually is. If your carrier partners are quoting you higher because capacity is tight rather than because demand is roaring, that's a more fragile floor than it looks. If the Fed raises rates, the demand side of trucking gets shakier, and a supply-driven recovery has little cushion from demand.

Trump says he might let USMCA lapse. The whole nearshoring trade is built on it.

Remember the Mexico story from Edition 49? America swapped China for Mexico without building a single factory, with the Interoceanic Corridor coming online and logistics providers planting flags in Puebla and betting on geography over policy?

Well, President Trump told reporters he may not renew USMCA, the free-trade pact he himself signed in his first term to replace NAFTA. He added the US doesn't need Canada's cars, lumber, or energy, or anything from Mexico, and that both countries have to treat the US better.

The USMCA is set to run through 2036, but it is subject to a mandatory joint review on July 1. If all three countries reaffirm, it locks in for another 16 years. If anyone balks, the agreement drops into a cycle of annual reviews, which is policy-speak for "a decade of uncertainty hanging over every cross-border supply chain decision." Canada has been publicly pushing for the clean 16-year renewal. Negotiations were set to start today in Washington.

Speaking about tariffs, a federal appeals court ruled Thursday that the administration can keep collecting its 10% worldwide tariff while the legal fight continues, finding the case "likely to succeed on the merits." That's the Section 122 tariff Trump rolled out after the Supreme Court struck down the broader IEEPA tariffs in February. It's set to expire July 24, and Section 122 caps you at 150 days before Congress has to weigh in.

What this means for you: The Mexico nearshoring bet isn't dead, and the Interoceanic Corridor concrete doesn't un-pour itself because of a press conference. But if you or your clients have been routing investment south on the assumption that the USMCA is a permanent fixture, July has just become a month worth watching closely. If your cross-border strategy depends on the agreement itself rather than the map in general, build in a contingency before the July 1 review.

QUICK HITS

A German robotics startup just raised more than most countries' defense budgets. NEURA Robotics raised a Series C of up to $1.4 billion to build what it's calling a "Physical AI" platform, featuring cognitive robots and humanoids that learn and work in the real world. The investor list: Amazon, NVIDIA, Qualcomm, Bosch, Schaeffler, the European Investment Bank, and Tether all wrote checks. We've watched the warehouse-automation money pile up all spring, from Locus grabbing Nexera's grasping tech to AIP buying Honeywell's warehouse unit. This one's bigger and broader, aimed at humanoids that work beside people rather than bolted-down arms. When Amazon and NVIDIA are both on the same cap table, it's worth noting where the smart money thinks the warehouse floor is heading.

Mercury bought King Courier in a deal that's a quiet masterclass in why owners sell to the right buyer. Mercury acquired King Courier, a Northern California logistics provider serving healthcare, biotech, and legal clients, thereby expanding its on-the-ground footprint in the San Francisco life sciences corridor. King's roughly 30 drivers and dispatchers get plugged into Mercury's cold-chain and international network. The interesting part is the why. King's owner, Chris Snell, was planning his retirement and explicitly chose Mercury because it isn't private-equity-owned and, in his words, is in it for the long run. This one's a reminder that for a lot of founder-owned 3PLs, who buys you matters as much as the multiple, especially when your name's been on the door for decades.

Everybody wants a supply chain person who can also do AI. Almost nobody exists. Gartner found that demand for supply chain roles requiring AI skills jumped 387% from Q1 2023 to Q1 2026, outpacing AI-skill demand across the broader labor market and outpacing supply chain hiring overall. The gap is widening faster than anyone can hire their way out of it, which means higher pay and longer searches for anyone hunting that rare combination of supply chain fluency and AI proficiency. The tech is arriving faster than the people who can run it.

MARK YOUR CALENDAR

Amazon Prime Day is next week. Running Tuesday through Friday (June 23-26). This is the first time Amazon has yanked its giant mid-year sales spike out of July and dropped it into the back end of Q2. If you haven't already pressure-tested your labor plan for next week, today's the day.

Deposco is hosting a free webinar Thursday, June 18, on how 3PLs are using client portals to surface account profitability, worth the hour if you're in this space. Reserve Your Spot →

_______________________________________________________________________

That's all for this week. If you found this useful, consider subscribing.
(Your data will not be shared. Subscribers' data is strictly for sending out the weekly newsletter.)

Hey everyone,

If it's your first time reading one of my posts, my name is Menachem, and I have a weekly newsletter called Logistic Pulse that breaks down the top logistics news from the past week, so you're always up to date.

Let's jump into it.

Amazon spooked the entire LTL sector last week. Nobody can quite agree on what it actually announced.

Amazon is once again spooking the logistics industry, this time targeting the less-than-truckload market, causing shares of companies like Saia, ArcBest, Old Dominion and XPO to fall.

Here's what makes this one fun, though. A week later, the smartest people in the LTL business still can't agree on what Amazon actually sold them.

The announcement itself sounded huge. Amazon said its LTL service, which used to only haul freight inbound to its own fulfillment centers, was "officially open for all businesses to any type of destination." Ship one to six pallets, ranging from 150 to 15,000 pounds, to your warehouse, stores, or distributors. Next-day pickup if you book by 5 pm, same-day with drop trailers, GPS tracking, electronic proof of delivery, the whole modern package. And to flex its muscle, Amazon pointed to a fleet of 80,000-plus trailers and roughly 24,000 intermodal containers.

Which is where the record scratched.

Because if you actually run LTL for a living, that number is a tell, not a flex. "What has 80,000 trailers got to do with LTL? And who needs intermodal containers for LTL?" asked Satish Jindel of SJ Consulting, who's been reading this sector for decades. The thing that actually makes an LTL carrier an LTL carrier isn't trailers. It's the terminal network, the dense web of cross-docks where freight gets broken apart, sorted, and reloaded. That's the barrier to entry everyone always said protected Old Dominion and Saia. And it's the one thing Amazon was conspicuously quiet about. When asked directly whether it had an LTL terminal network, Amazon said it contracts with carriers for pickup and delivery, has "terminals," and will add more this year. Its own coverage map shows clusters that look much more like a fulfillment footprint than an LTL one: five facilities around Indianapolis and three near Detroit. TD Cowen's Jason Seidl counted roughly 74 actual cross-dock facilities as of early 2025, which is not a national LTL network.

So Jindel's read is that Amazon isn't becoming an LTL carrier at all. It's setting up as a broker, leveraging its status as one of the biggest LTL shippers in the country to secure cheap capacity from real carriers and resell it. In other words, the company it's actually coming for isn't Old Dominion. It's CH Robinson and Echo. (Amazon pushed back hard, insisting the service is "asset-backed," runs on its own equipment, and uses dedicated LTL-trained drivers.)

What this means for you: Don't let the stock chart write your strategy. The market reacted to the word "LTL" and the eye-popping trailer count; the people who know the sector reacted to what was missing, a terminal network, and concluded this looks more like a brokerage play than a carrier invasion. If you broker freight, that's the version worth watching, because brokerage is exactly where Amazon's data and buying power do the most damage. If you move freight through asset-based LTL carriers, the near-term threat is smaller than the headlines, but file this next to everything else Amazon's done this year: it keeps announcing the destination years before it arrives, and the market keeps pricing in the trip the day of the press release.

The freight market finally turned. The catch is there's nobody left to drive.

If you've been hauling freight for the last four years, you've earned the right to a little celebration this week. The downturn is over. Carriers are saying it out loud now, which they don't do unless they mean it.

The Logistics Managers' Index clocked transportation prices rising in May at the fastest rate for any metric in the report's ten-year history. Dry-van spot rates for the first week of June were up about 52% year-over-year before fuel. Flatbed spot rates hit an all-time high, propped up by the data-center construction boom. Estes is adding to its fleet of 10,500-plus trucks and growing its driver pool. After four years of pain, that's a real turn.

But read the fine print, because it changes everything about how this recovery feels on the ground.

This is a supply-driven recovery, not a demand-driven one. Translation: freight isn't booming. Volumes are flat to barely up. What changed is the number of trucks chasing those loads has collapsed. Rates are rising not because there's suddenly a flood of stuff to move, but because there's suddenly nobody to move it.

Why did all those trucks disappear?

Part of it was the long grind. Rates cratered in 2022, hundreds of thousands of small carriers went under, and the survivors were squeezed by rising costs across the board. But the accelerant over the past year has been federal policy. The administration started enforcing English-language proficiency rules and choking off commercial licenses for many immigrant drivers, and the exodus picked up speed.

This week we got a vivid snapshot of exactly how that's playing out, state by state. Ohio is revoking the licenses of about 1,200 foreign truckers and has stopped issuing non-domiciled CDLs entirely. Roughly 5,000 drivers holding those licenses are getting either a revocation notice or a "valid until it expires, then you're done" letter. The state was crystal clear that it has no plans to ever resume issuing them. Oregon yanked credentials from 900 foreign truckers in March, and the list goes on and on.

Stack these up, and the freight recovery starts to look less like a rebound and more like a supply shock with a federal policy engine behind it. The drivers aren't coming back because, in a growing number of states, they're not legally allowed to.

So what fills the gap? Here's the third piece:

PepsiCo now operates 35 driverless trucks on public roads in Arizona, hauling products between plants, warehouses, and stores. It's the first major US consumer-goods company to fess up to large-scale autonomous trucking on public roads. The trucks, built by the autonomy company Gatik, have five more running in Texas and one in Arkansas.

Autonomy lets the company grow the business without adding as many employees. The driverless trucks do best on short, repetitive, back-and-forth runs, the bottling-plant-to-storage shuttle, which is exactly the kind of route a freshly-licensed human driver used to cover.

Put all three together, and you've got a clean cause-and-effect chain. Policy pulls drivers out of the market. The driver shortage tightens capacity and lifts rates, which is most of why the "recovery" exists at all. And the tighter that human driver pool gets, the more attractive the truck that doesn't need a license, a visa, or a lunch break starts to look.

What this means for you: Enjoy the rate environment, but understand what it actually is. If your carrier partners are quoting you higher because capacity is tight rather than because demand is roaring, that's a more fragile floor than it looks. If the Fed raises rates, the demand side of trucking gets shakier, and a supply-driven recovery has little cushion from demand.

Trump says he might let USMCA lapse. The whole nearshoring trade is built on it.

Remember the Mexico story from Edition 49? America swapped China for Mexico without building a single factory, with the Interoceanic Corridor coming online and logistics providers planting flags in Puebla and betting on geography over policy?

Well, President Trump told reporters he may not renew USMCA, the free-trade pact he himself signed in his first term to replace NAFTA. He added the US doesn't need Canada's cars, lumber, or energy, or anything from Mexico, and that both countries have to treat the US better.

The USMCA is set to run through 2036, but it is subject to a mandatory joint review on July 1. If all three countries reaffirm, it locks in for another 16 years. If anyone balks, the agreement drops into a cycle of annual reviews, which is policy-speak for "a decade of uncertainty hanging over every cross-border supply chain decision." Canada has been publicly pushing for the clean 16-year renewal. Negotiations were set to start today in Washington.

Speaking about tariffs, a federal appeals court ruled Thursday that the administration can keep collecting its 10% worldwide tariff while the legal fight continues, finding the case "likely to succeed on the merits." That's the Section 122 tariff Trump rolled out after the Supreme Court struck down the broader IEEPA tariffs in February. It's set to expire July 24, and Section 122 caps you at 150 days before Congress has to weigh in.

What this means for you: The Mexico nearshoring bet isn't dead, and the Interoceanic Corridor concrete doesn't un-pour itself because of a press conference. But if you or your clients have been routing investment south on the assumption that the USMCA is a permanent fixture, July has just become a month worth watching closely. If your cross-border strategy depends on the agreement itself rather than the map in general, build in a contingency before the July 1 review.

QUICK HITS

A German robotics startup just raised more than most countries' defense budgets. NEURA Robotics raised a Series C of up to $1.4 billion to build what it's calling a "Physical AI" platform, featuring cognitive robots and humanoids that learn and work in the real world. The investor list: Amazon, NVIDIA, Qualcomm, Bosch, Schaeffler, the European Investment Bank, and Tether all wrote checks. We've watched the warehouse-automation money pile up all spring, from Locus grabbing Nexera's grasping tech to AIP buying Honeywell's warehouse unit. This one's bigger and broader, aimed at humanoids that work beside people rather than bolted-down arms. When Amazon and NVIDIA are both on the same cap table, it's worth noting where the smart money thinks the warehouse floor is heading.

Mercury bought King Courier in a deal that's a quiet masterclass in why owners sell to the right buyer. Mercury acquired King Courier, a Northern California logistics provider serving healthcare, biotech, and legal clients, thereby expanding its on-the-ground footprint in the San Francisco life sciences corridor. King's roughly 30 drivers and dispatchers get plugged into Mercury's cold-chain and international network. The interesting part is the why. King's owner, Chris Snell, was planning his retirement and explicitly chose Mercury because it isn't private-equity-owned and, in his words, is in it for the long run. This one's a reminder that for a lot of founder-owned 3PLs, who buys you matters as much as the multiple, especially when your name's been on the door for decades.

Everybody wants a supply chain person who can also do AI. Almost nobody exists. Gartner found that demand for supply chain roles requiring AI skills jumped 387% from Q1 2023 to Q1 2026, outpacing AI-skill demand across the broader labor market and outpacing supply chain hiring overall. The gap is widening faster than anyone can hire their way out of it, which means higher pay and longer searches for anyone hunting that rare combination of supply chain fluency and AI proficiency. The tech is arriving faster than the people who can run it.

MARK YOUR CALENDAR

Amazon Prime Day is next week. Running Tuesday through Friday (June 23-26). This is the first time Amazon has yanked its giant mid-year sales spike out of July and dropped it into the back end of Q2. If you haven't already pressure-tested your labor plan for next week, today's the day.

Deposco is hosting a free webinar Thursday, June 18, on how 3PLs are using client portals to surface account profitability, worth the hour if you're in this space. Reserve Your Spot →

_______________________________________________________________________

That's all for this week. If you found this useful, consider subscribing.
(Your data will not be shared. Subscribers' data is strictly for sending out the weekly newsletter.)

Hey everyone,

If it's your first time reading one of my posts, my name is Menachem, and I have a weekly newsletter called Logistic Pulse that breaks down the top logistics news from the past week, so you're always up to date.

Let's jump into it.

Amazon spooked the entire LTL sector last week. Nobody can quite agree on what it actually announced.

Amazon is once again spooking the logistics industry, this time targeting the less-than-truckload market, causing shares of companies like Saia, ArcBest, Old Dominion and XPO to fall.

Here's what makes this one fun, though. A week later, the smartest people in the LTL business still can't agree on what Amazon actually sold them.

The announcement itself sounded huge. Amazon said its LTL service, which used to only haul freight inbound to its own fulfillment centers, was "officially open for all businesses to any type of destination." Ship one to six pallets, ranging from 150 to 15,000 pounds, to your warehouse, stores, or distributors. Next-day pickup if you book by 5 pm, same-day with drop trailers, GPS tracking, electronic proof of delivery, the whole modern package. And to flex its muscle, Amazon pointed to a fleet of 80,000-plus trailers and roughly 24,000 intermodal containers.

Which is where the record scratched.

Because if you actually run LTL for a living, that number is a tell, not a flex. "What has 80,000 trailers got to do with LTL? And who needs intermodal containers for LTL?" asked Satish Jindel of SJ Consulting, who's been reading this sector for decades. The thing that actually makes an LTL carrier an LTL carrier isn't trailers. It's the terminal network, the dense web of cross-docks where freight gets broken apart, sorted, and reloaded. That's the barrier to entry everyone always said protected Old Dominion and Saia. And it's the one thing Amazon was conspicuously quiet about. When asked directly whether it had an LTL terminal network, Amazon said it contracts with carriers for pickup and delivery, has "terminals," and will add more this year. Its own coverage map shows clusters that look much more like a fulfillment footprint than an LTL one: five facilities around Indianapolis and three near Detroit. TD Cowen's Jason Seidl counted roughly 74 actual cross-dock facilities as of early 2025, which is not a national LTL network.

So Jindel's read is that Amazon isn't becoming an LTL carrier at all. It's setting up as a broker, leveraging its status as one of the biggest LTL shippers in the country to secure cheap capacity from real carriers and resell it. In other words, the company it's actually coming for isn't Old Dominion. It's CH Robinson and Echo. (Amazon pushed back hard, insisting the service is "asset-backed," runs on its own equipment, and uses dedicated LTL-trained drivers.)

What this means for you: Don't let the stock chart write your strategy. The market reacted to the word "LTL" and the eye-popping trailer count; the people who know the sector reacted to what was missing, a terminal network, and concluded this looks more like a brokerage play than a carrier invasion. If you broker freight, that's the version worth watching, because brokerage is exactly where Amazon's data and buying power do the most damage. If you move freight through asset-based LTL carriers, the near-term threat is smaller than the headlines, but file this next to everything else Amazon's done this year: it keeps announcing the destination years before it arrives, and the market keeps pricing in the trip the day of the press release.

The freight market finally turned. The catch is there's nobody left to drive.

If you've been hauling freight for the last four years, you've earned the right to a little celebration this week. The downturn is over. Carriers are saying it out loud now, which they don't do unless they mean it.

The Logistics Managers' Index clocked transportation prices rising in May at the fastest rate for any metric in the report's ten-year history. Dry-van spot rates for the first week of June were up about 52% year-over-year before fuel. Flatbed spot rates hit an all-time high, propped up by the data-center construction boom. Estes is adding to its fleet of 10,500-plus trucks and growing its driver pool. After four years of pain, that's a real turn.

But read the fine print, because it changes everything about how this recovery feels on the ground.

This is a supply-driven recovery, not a demand-driven one. Translation: freight isn't booming. Volumes are flat to barely up. What changed is the number of trucks chasing those loads has collapsed. Rates are rising not because there's suddenly a flood of stuff to move, but because there's suddenly nobody to move it.

Why did all those trucks disappear?

Part of it was the long grind. Rates cratered in 2022, hundreds of thousands of small carriers went under, and the survivors were squeezed by rising costs across the board. But the accelerant over the past year has been federal policy. The administration started enforcing English-language proficiency rules and choking off commercial licenses for many immigrant drivers, and the exodus picked up speed.

This week we got a vivid snapshot of exactly how that's playing out, state by state. Ohio is revoking the licenses of about 1,200 foreign truckers and has stopped issuing non-domiciled CDLs entirely. Roughly 5,000 drivers holding those licenses are getting either a revocation notice or a "valid until it expires, then you're done" letter. The state was crystal clear that it has no plans to ever resume issuing them. Oregon yanked credentials from 900 foreign truckers in March, and the list goes on and on.

Stack these up, and the freight recovery starts to look less like a rebound and more like a supply shock with a federal policy engine behind it. The drivers aren't coming back because, in a growing number of states, they're not legally allowed to.

So what fills the gap? Here's the third piece:

PepsiCo now operates 35 driverless trucks on public roads in Arizona, hauling products between plants, warehouses, and stores. It's the first major US consumer-goods company to fess up to large-scale autonomous trucking on public roads. The trucks, built by the autonomy company Gatik, have five more running in Texas and one in Arkansas.

Autonomy lets the company grow the business without adding as many employees. The driverless trucks do best on short, repetitive, back-and-forth runs, the bottling-plant-to-storage shuttle, which is exactly the kind of route a freshly-licensed human driver used to cover.

Put all three together, and you've got a clean cause-and-effect chain. Policy pulls drivers out of the market. The driver shortage tightens capacity and lifts rates, which is most of why the "recovery" exists at all. And the tighter that human driver pool gets, the more attractive the truck that doesn't need a license, a visa, or a lunch break starts to look.

What this means for you: Enjoy the rate environment, but understand what it actually is. If your carrier partners are quoting you higher because capacity is tight rather than because demand is roaring, that's a more fragile floor than it looks. If the Fed raises rates, the demand side of trucking gets shakier, and a supply-driven recovery has little cushion from demand.

Trump says he might let USMCA lapse. The whole nearshoring trade is built on it.

Remember the Mexico story from Edition 49? America swapped China for Mexico without building a single factory, with the Interoceanic Corridor coming online and logistics providers planting flags in Puebla and betting on geography over policy?

Well, President Trump told reporters he may not renew USMCA, the free-trade pact he himself signed in his first term to replace NAFTA. He added the US doesn't need Canada's cars, lumber, or energy, or anything from Mexico, and that both countries have to treat the US better.

The USMCA is set to run through 2036, but it is subject to a mandatory joint review on July 1. If all three countries reaffirm, it locks in for another 16 years. If anyone balks, the agreement drops into a cycle of annual reviews, which is policy-speak for "a decade of uncertainty hanging over every cross-border supply chain decision." Canada has been publicly pushing for the clean 16-year renewal. Negotiations were set to start today in Washington.

Speaking about tariffs, a federal appeals court ruled Thursday that the administration can keep collecting its 10% worldwide tariff while the legal fight continues, finding the case "likely to succeed on the merits." That's the Section 122 tariff Trump rolled out after the Supreme Court struck down the broader IEEPA tariffs in February. It's set to expire July 24, and Section 122 caps you at 150 days before Congress has to weigh in.

What this means for you: The Mexico nearshoring bet isn't dead, and the Interoceanic Corridor concrete doesn't un-pour itself because of a press conference. But if you or your clients have been routing investment south on the assumption that the USMCA is a permanent fixture, July has just become a month worth watching closely. If your cross-border strategy depends on the agreement itself rather than the map in general, build in a contingency before the July 1 review.

QUICK HITS

A German robotics startup just raised more than most countries' defense budgets. NEURA Robotics raised a Series C of up to $1.4 billion to build what it's calling a "Physical AI" platform, featuring cognitive robots and humanoids that learn and work in the real world. The investor list: Amazon, NVIDIA, Qualcomm, Bosch, Schaeffler, the European Investment Bank, and Tether all wrote checks. We've watched the warehouse-automation money pile up all spring, from Locus grabbing Nexera's grasping tech to AIP buying Honeywell's warehouse unit. This one's bigger and broader, aimed at humanoids that work beside people rather than bolted-down arms. When Amazon and NVIDIA are both on the same cap table, it's worth noting where the smart money thinks the warehouse floor is heading.

Mercury bought King Courier in a deal that's a quiet masterclass in why owners sell to the right buyer. Mercury acquired King Courier, a Northern California logistics provider serving healthcare, biotech, and legal clients, thereby expanding its on-the-ground footprint in the San Francisco life sciences corridor. King's roughly 30 drivers and dispatchers get plugged into Mercury's cold-chain and international network. The interesting part is the why. King's owner, Chris Snell, was planning his retirement and explicitly chose Mercury because it isn't private-equity-owned and, in his words, is in it for the long run. This one's a reminder that for a lot of founder-owned 3PLs, who buys you matters as much as the multiple, especially when your name's been on the door for decades.

Everybody wants a supply chain person who can also do AI. Almost nobody exists. Gartner found that demand for supply chain roles requiring AI skills jumped 387% from Q1 2023 to Q1 2026, outpacing AI-skill demand across the broader labor market and outpacing supply chain hiring overall. The gap is widening faster than anyone can hire their way out of it, which means higher pay and longer searches for anyone hunting that rare combination of supply chain fluency and AI proficiency. The tech is arriving faster than the people who can run it.

MARK YOUR CALENDAR

Amazon Prime Day is next week. Running Tuesday through Friday (June 23-26). This is the first time Amazon has yanked its giant mid-year sales spike out of July and dropped it into the back end of Q2. If you haven't already pressure-tested your labor plan for next week, today's the day.

Deposco is hosting a free webinar Thursday, June 18, on how 3PLs are using client portals to surface account profitability, worth the hour if you're in this space. Reserve Your Spot →

_______________________________________________________________________

That's all for this week. If you found this useful, consider subscribing.
(Your data will not be shared. Subscribers' data is strictly for sending out the weekly newsletter.)

Hey everyone,

If it's your first time reading one of my posts, my name is Menachem, and I have a weekly newsletter called Logistic Pulse that breaks down the top logistics news from the past week, so you're always up to date.

Let's jump into it.

Amazon spooked the entire LTL sector last week. Nobody can quite agree on what it actually announced.

Amazon is once again spooking the logistics industry, this time targeting the less-than-truckload market, causing shares of companies like Saia, ArcBest, Old Dominion and XPO to fall.

Here's what makes this one fun, though. A week later, the smartest people in the LTL business still can't agree on what Amazon actually sold them.

The announcement itself sounded huge. Amazon said its LTL service, which used to only haul freight inbound to its own fulfillment centers, was "officially open for all businesses to any type of destination." Ship one to six pallets, ranging from 150 to 15,000 pounds, to your warehouse, stores, or distributors. Next-day pickup if you book by 5 pm, same-day with drop trailers, GPS tracking, electronic proof of delivery, the whole modern package. And to flex its muscle, Amazon pointed to a fleet of 80,000-plus trailers and roughly 24,000 intermodal containers.

Which is where the record scratched.

Because if you actually run LTL for a living, that number is a tell, not a flex. "What has 80,000 trailers got to do with LTL? And who needs intermodal containers for LTL?" asked Satish Jindel of SJ Consulting, who's been reading this sector for decades. The thing that actually makes an LTL carrier an LTL carrier isn't trailers. It's the terminal network, the dense web of cross-docks where freight gets broken apart, sorted, and reloaded. That's the barrier to entry everyone always said protected Old Dominion and Saia. And it's the one thing Amazon was conspicuously quiet about. When asked directly whether it had an LTL terminal network, Amazon said it contracts with carriers for pickup and delivery, has "terminals," and will add more this year. Its own coverage map shows clusters that look much more like a fulfillment footprint than an LTL one: five facilities around Indianapolis and three near Detroit. TD Cowen's Jason Seidl counted roughly 74 actual cross-dock facilities as of early 2025, which is not a national LTL network.

So Jindel's read is that Amazon isn't becoming an LTL carrier at all. It's setting up as a broker, leveraging its status as one of the biggest LTL shippers in the country to secure cheap capacity from real carriers and resell it. In other words, the company it's actually coming for isn't Old Dominion. It's CH Robinson and Echo. (Amazon pushed back hard, insisting the service is "asset-backed," runs on its own equipment, and uses dedicated LTL-trained drivers.)

What this means for you: Don't let the stock chart write your strategy. The market reacted to the word "LTL" and the eye-popping trailer count; the people who know the sector reacted to what was missing, a terminal network, and concluded this looks more like a brokerage play than a carrier invasion. If you broker freight, that's the version worth watching, because brokerage is exactly where Amazon's data and buying power do the most damage. If you move freight through asset-based LTL carriers, the near-term threat is smaller than the headlines, but file this next to everything else Amazon's done this year: it keeps announcing the destination years before it arrives, and the market keeps pricing in the trip the day of the press release.

The freight market finally turned. The catch is there's nobody left to drive.

If you've been hauling freight for the last four years, you've earned the right to a little celebration this week. The downturn is over. Carriers are saying it out loud now, which they don't do unless they mean it.

The Logistics Managers' Index clocked transportation prices rising in May at the fastest rate for any metric in the report's ten-year history. Dry-van spot rates for the first week of June were up about 52% year-over-year before fuel. Flatbed spot rates hit an all-time high, propped up by the data-center construction boom. Estes is adding to its fleet of 10,500-plus trucks and growing its driver pool. After four years of pain, that's a real turn.

But read the fine print, because it changes everything about how this recovery feels on the ground.

This is a supply-driven recovery, not a demand-driven one. Translation: freight isn't booming. Volumes are flat to barely up. What changed is the number of trucks chasing those loads has collapsed. Rates are rising not because there's suddenly a flood of stuff to move, but because there's suddenly nobody to move it.

Why did all those trucks disappear?

Part of it was the long grind. Rates cratered in 2022, hundreds of thousands of small carriers went under, and the survivors were squeezed by rising costs across the board. But the accelerant over the past year has been federal policy. The administration started enforcing English-language proficiency rules and choking off commercial licenses for many immigrant drivers, and the exodus picked up speed.

This week we got a vivid snapshot of exactly how that's playing out, state by state. Ohio is revoking the licenses of about 1,200 foreign truckers and has stopped issuing non-domiciled CDLs entirely. Roughly 5,000 drivers holding those licenses are getting either a revocation notice or a "valid until it expires, then you're done" letter. The state was crystal clear that it has no plans to ever resume issuing them. Oregon yanked credentials from 900 foreign truckers in March, and the list goes on and on.

Stack these up, and the freight recovery starts to look less like a rebound and more like a supply shock with a federal policy engine behind it. The drivers aren't coming back because, in a growing number of states, they're not legally allowed to.

So what fills the gap? Here's the third piece:

PepsiCo now operates 35 driverless trucks on public roads in Arizona, hauling products between plants, warehouses, and stores. It's the first major US consumer-goods company to fess up to large-scale autonomous trucking on public roads. The trucks, built by the autonomy company Gatik, have five more running in Texas and one in Arkansas.

Autonomy lets the company grow the business without adding as many employees. The driverless trucks do best on short, repetitive, back-and-forth runs, the bottling-plant-to-storage shuttle, which is exactly the kind of route a freshly-licensed human driver used to cover.

Put all three together, and you've got a clean cause-and-effect chain. Policy pulls drivers out of the market. The driver shortage tightens capacity and lifts rates, which is most of why the "recovery" exists at all. And the tighter that human driver pool gets, the more attractive the truck that doesn't need a license, a visa, or a lunch break starts to look.

What this means for you: Enjoy the rate environment, but understand what it actually is. If your carrier partners are quoting you higher because capacity is tight rather than because demand is roaring, that's a more fragile floor than it looks. If the Fed raises rates, the demand side of trucking gets shakier, and a supply-driven recovery has little cushion from demand.

Trump says he might let USMCA lapse. The whole nearshoring trade is built on it.

Remember the Mexico story from Edition 49? America swapped China for Mexico without building a single factory, with the Interoceanic Corridor coming online and logistics providers planting flags in Puebla and betting on geography over policy?

Well, President Trump told reporters he may not renew USMCA, the free-trade pact he himself signed in his first term to replace NAFTA. He added the US doesn't need Canada's cars, lumber, or energy, or anything from Mexico, and that both countries have to treat the US better.

The USMCA is set to run through 2036, but it is subject to a mandatory joint review on July 1. If all three countries reaffirm, it locks in for another 16 years. If anyone balks, the agreement drops into a cycle of annual reviews, which is policy-speak for "a decade of uncertainty hanging over every cross-border supply chain decision." Canada has been publicly pushing for the clean 16-year renewal. Negotiations were set to start today in Washington.

Speaking about tariffs, a federal appeals court ruled Thursday that the administration can keep collecting its 10% worldwide tariff while the legal fight continues, finding the case "likely to succeed on the merits." That's the Section 122 tariff Trump rolled out after the Supreme Court struck down the broader IEEPA tariffs in February. It's set to expire July 24, and Section 122 caps you at 150 days before Congress has to weigh in.

What this means for you: The Mexico nearshoring bet isn't dead, and the Interoceanic Corridor concrete doesn't un-pour itself because of a press conference. But if you or your clients have been routing investment south on the assumption that the USMCA is a permanent fixture, July has just become a month worth watching closely. If your cross-border strategy depends on the agreement itself rather than the map in general, build in a contingency before the July 1 review.

QUICK HITS

A German robotics startup just raised more than most countries' defense budgets. NEURA Robotics raised a Series C of up to $1.4 billion to build what it's calling a "Physical AI" platform, featuring cognitive robots and humanoids that learn and work in the real world. The investor list: Amazon, NVIDIA, Qualcomm, Bosch, Schaeffler, the European Investment Bank, and Tether all wrote checks. We've watched the warehouse-automation money pile up all spring, from Locus grabbing Nexera's grasping tech to AIP buying Honeywell's warehouse unit. This one's bigger and broader, aimed at humanoids that work beside people rather than bolted-down arms. When Amazon and NVIDIA are both on the same cap table, it's worth noting where the smart money thinks the warehouse floor is heading.

Mercury bought King Courier in a deal that's a quiet masterclass in why owners sell to the right buyer. Mercury acquired King Courier, a Northern California logistics provider serving healthcare, biotech, and legal clients, thereby expanding its on-the-ground footprint in the San Francisco life sciences corridor. King's roughly 30 drivers and dispatchers get plugged into Mercury's cold-chain and international network. The interesting part is the why. King's owner, Chris Snell, was planning his retirement and explicitly chose Mercury because it isn't private-equity-owned and, in his words, is in it for the long run. This one's a reminder that for a lot of founder-owned 3PLs, who buys you matters as much as the multiple, especially when your name's been on the door for decades.

Everybody wants a supply chain person who can also do AI. Almost nobody exists. Gartner found that demand for supply chain roles requiring AI skills jumped 387% from Q1 2023 to Q1 2026, outpacing AI-skill demand across the broader labor market and outpacing supply chain hiring overall. The gap is widening faster than anyone can hire their way out of it, which means higher pay and longer searches for anyone hunting that rare combination of supply chain fluency and AI proficiency. The tech is arriving faster than the people who can run it.

MARK YOUR CALENDAR

Amazon Prime Day is next week. Running Tuesday through Friday (June 23-26). This is the first time Amazon has yanked its giant mid-year sales spike out of July and dropped it into the back end of Q2. If you haven't already pressure-tested your labor plan for next week, today's the day.

Deposco is hosting a free webinar Thursday, June 18, on how 3PLs are using client portals to surface account profitability, worth the hour if you're in this space. Reserve Your Spot →

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Hey everyone,

If it's your first time reading one of my posts, I break down the top logistics news from the past week, so you're always up to date.

Let's jump into it,

The Supreme Court just ended freight brokerage's free pass

Freight brokers used to have a legal shield that made it almost impossible to sue them when a carrier they hired caused an accident. The Supreme Court just took that shield away. Unanimously.

The case goes like this. A guy named Shawn Montgomery lost his leg when a truck hauling plastic pots veered off the road in Illinois. C.H. Robinson was the freight broker that booked the carrier. Montgomery tried to sue Robinson for hiring a dangerous carrier. C.H. Robinson's defense was essentially: federal law protects us from these kinds of lawsuits. A lower court agreed. The Supreme Court said no, actually, it doesn't.

That defense, which brokers across the industry have leaned on for years, is now gone.

So what changes? Brokers can now be sued in any state if they hired a carrier that had obvious red flags and something went wrong. The legal standard isn't that brokers have to guarantee nothing bad ever happens. It's just that they have to do their homework before booking a carrier. Check their safety record. Look them up. If a carrier had a terrible track record and you booked them anyway and someone got hurt, you're going to have a hard time explaining that to a jury.

The scary part is how much information is freely available. FMCSA's safety database is public and free. Crash rates, inspection history, out-of-service records, all of it is right there. Plaintiff attorneys have known this for years and have been building cases in anticipation of exactly this ruling. Those cases are getting filed soon.

And it's not just brokers. The court wrote about brokers because that's who the case was about, but the same logic applies to 3PLs, freight forwarders, and anyone else who selects carriers as part of their business.

What this means for you: If you broker freight or select carriers on behalf of clients, you need a documented process for vetting them. Not a mental checklist. An actual written process with records you can pull up later. If your current approach is basically "they have a valid license and a truck," that's not going to cut it anymore. Call your insurance broker, too, and ask whether your current coverage would actually respond to this kind of claim, because many policies weren't written with this exposure in mind.

UniUni is heading for a public market debut

Four weeks ago, we covered the Canadian 3PL expansion story in Edition 41: GXO opening in Mississauga, Arvato acquiring Think Logistics, IMC, and DP World planting flags north of the border. The thesis was that Canada's 3PL market, projected to nearly double to $49.7 billion by 2033, was finally ready for its moment.

This week, the biggest Canadian last-mile story yet: UniUni, the Richmond, BC-based delivery company, is reportedly planning to go public via a SPAC merger.

According to The Globe and Mail, the deal would merge UniUni with MAK Acquisition, a TSX-listed SPAC led by former Dye & Durham CEO Matthew Proud, valuing the combined entity at over $1 billion USD. UniUni is also raising $100 million in a PIPE alongside the deal. MAK confirmed it's in discussions but hasn't signed anything.

The numbers in the confidential memo obtained by The Globe and Mail are striking. Revenue grew from $113 million in 2023 to $295 million in 2024, then to $683 million in 2025. The company expects $1.1 billion this year and $1.5 billion in 2027. They lost $70 million in 2025 but expect profitability this year and $125 million in pre-tax profit in 2027.

UniUni runs a gig-powered delivery model, with 100,000 registered drivers delivering 1.2 million packages per day. Its primary customers are Shein and Temu. The company raised $85 million just two months ago from Beijing-based Rockets Capital and RBC, bringing total funding to $285 million.

There are some things worth watching carefully here. Uni's labor practices have drawn scrutiny, including multiple proposed class-action lawsuits. Media reports last year surfaced sordid conditions at a Connecticut warehouse. A company going public with that kind of background will face a different level of examination than a private operator.

But the growth trajectory is hard to argue with. And the timing, landing right as the Canada 3PL market is heating up and as Shein and Temu continue scaling North American operations, isn't an accident.

Trucks are the new ships

We've been tracking the Gulf crisis since the Strait of Hormuz closed, and one of the stories nobody expected to write is this: the global economy is partly being held together by 3,500 trucks running around the clock across the Arabian desert.

The Hormuz closure forced a rapid rerouting of trade. Shipping lanes built around a single chokepoint suddenly became unusable. What happened next was improvised on a scale that's genuinely hard to process.

Saudi Arabia's state-controlled mining company, Maaden, which exports phosphate fertilizer to global markets, had its entire supply chain misdirected. Its CEO, Bob Wilt, dispatched executives to Red Sea ports within days of the conflict starting. Two weeks later, he had rail and truck operators lined up. Six hundred trucks became 1,600, became 2,000, became 3,500. Each truck runs with two drivers to keep moving around the clock.

Wilt said Maaden will have caught up on its export backlog by the end of May. The cargo is already reaching Djibouti, Thailand, and Argentina via the Red Sea port of Yanbu.

And Maaden isn't the only one. MSC and Maersk are trucking goods across the Arabian Peninsula. Etihad Rail Freight moved hundreds of Nissans by train from Fujairah to Abu Dhabi, the country's first vehicle transport by rail. The UAE's port of Khor Fakkan saw truck traffic explode from 100 a day to 7,000. Weekly container traffic at the port went from 2,000 to 50,000. The operator, Gulftainer, hired 900 people in two weeks.

A UAE supermarket chain dispatched trucks loaded with British snacks on a 16-day journey from Kent through Western Europe, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia to Dubai. This is the kind of supply chain improvisation that doesn't fit in a playbook.

Trucking routes can't match the capacity of ocean shipping or compete on cost. And they don't fix the energy crunch. But they've become a meaningful shock absorber in key markets, sustaining trade flows that would otherwise have collapsed.

It's also worth reading alongside the Mexico corridor story from a few weeks ago. Whether it's Mexico's Interoceanic Corridor, the Arabian desert routes, or LNG tankers taking the long way around, the same pattern keeps showing up: when a single-point bottleneck breaks, geography and improvisation fill the gap faster than anyone predicted. The traders who are ahead of it are the ones who already had contingency options mapped.

The tariff refunds are actually showing up

Back in Edition 42, we told you the CAPE portal was going live on April 20 and that the government was sitting on up to $175 billion in tariff refunds from duties the Supreme Court struck down in February. We told you to get your clients moving.

Here's the update: the refunds are coming. Faster than expected.

Customs began accepting refund claims on April 20 and said payments would start hitting accounts around May 11. That timeline held. As of last Friday, at least one importer had money in their account. Others received approval notices indicating payments would follow within days.

CMCBrands, a St. Louis apparel company, received notice that its first claim for roughly $42,000 had been approved. Their CEO said she was shocked by how fast it happened. A small wine importer, one of the lead plaintiffs in the Supreme Court case, expects to receive $100,000 and plans to use most of it to pay off suppliers. An art supply company in Washington plans to use part of its $18,000 refund to pay down a credit line and fund new product development. A California-based flowerpot importer expecting $150,000 is planning a sourcing trip to Vietnam.

The catch: about 63% of shipments subject to the tariffs are eligible in this first phase. The rest could take until 2027 to process. And the refund process is not automatic. You have to opt in, file the right paperwork, and wait. Some importers are still running into errors on the portal.

If your clients haven't filed yet, get them moving. Make sure their customs paperwork is clean before they submit, because errors will slow everything down. And if you want an intro to someone who can file the paperwork and offer upfront cash while they wait, reply to this email.

QUICK HITS

LAST MILE ‘Amazon Now’, a 30-minute delivery service for groceries and household essentials, is now live in Atlanta, Dallas-Fort Worth, Philadelphia, and Seattle, with rapid expansion planned through the rest of the year. Prime members pay $3.99 per delivery. This isn't a shot at FedEx or UPS. It's Amazon planting a flag directly in Uber, DoorDash, and Instacart territory, going after the "I need it now" consumer who's been the whole bet for gig-economy delivery platforms.

M&A Fulfillment Crowd, the UK-based tech-led 3PL backed by Palatine private equity, acquired Fulfilment.nl, a Dutch e-commerce logistics specialist. Fulfilment.nl will operate independently within the group under its existing management team. The Netherlands is a critical European logistics hub, and for fulfilmentcrowd, this is a direct play at cross-border EU volume. The mid-market 3PL consolidation story isn't only happening in North America.

PARTNERSHIPS Instacart added Ace Hardware to its same-day delivery platform, with delivery in as fast as one hour from thousands of locations nationwide. We covered Instacart's acquisition of Instaleap in Edition 42, which was about accelerating international retail partnerships. This is the domestic version of the same strategy: turning Instacart from a grocery app into a local retail delivery layer. The platform now works with more than 2,200 retail banners across nearly 100,000 stores in North America. The pace of category expansion is not slowing down.

ENFORCEMENT A California aluminum company, Perfectus Aluminum Inc., agreed to pay $549.5 million to resolve allegations it evaded antidumping and countervailing duties on Chinese aluminum extrusions. The company imported millions of aluminum extrusions, spot-welded them into "pallets" to misrepresent them as finished merchandise not subject to duties, then imported over 2.2 million of them between 2011 and 2014. A jury convicted the company in 2021. The settlement resolves the civil case. $549.5 million is not a slap on the wrist. With the Trade Fraud Task Force operating at full speed, duty evasion is a much riskier calculation than it was five years ago.

INFRASTRUCTURE CH Robinson's Robinson Fresh division opened a 142,600 square-foot facility in Pharr, Texas, just miles from the US-Mexico border near the Pharr-Reynosa International Bridge. The facility has 69 dock doors, multiple temperature zones, and is designed specifically for fresh produce cross-border supply chains. 55% of all fresh produce imported from Mexico enters through Texas. As we've covered, Mexico's role in US supply chains is only getting more entrenched, not less, regardless of what happens in the courts on tariffs. Fresh produce was always going to need infrastructure that matches the volume.

INFRASTRUCTURE Dollar Tree opened a 1 million-square-foot distribution center in Litchfield Park, Arizona, which will serve about 700 stores across the West and Southwest starting next month. A second DC in Marietta, Oklahoma, is scheduled to open in 2027, replacing the facility destroyed by a tornado in 2024. The Arizona opening is part of a deliberate push to reduce transit miles and get product closer to stores. When a retailer whose entire brand promise is price talks about investing in speed, it's usually because transportation costs are eating into margins.

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