Pepsi has been putting profit over people for many, many years. Layoffs, shrink-flation, price gauging. It’s a gross company that continues to find new lows.

Cozying up to the goblin that is Mike Johnson is just the latest. The same people who actively make life harder for their frontline workers and people like them.

Fuck this company.

🚨Cold Warehouse Selector — Ravenna, OH🚨

🟢$17.00/hour
- Overtime: $25.50/hour
- 45–55 hours per week
- Weekly Production Bonuses Available

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Monday: OFF
Tuesday: 5:00 PM
Wednesday: OFF
Thursday: 4:00 PM
Friday: 6:00 PM
Saturday: OFF

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- Must be comfortable working in a cold environment
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🟢Duties:
- Pick orders accurately using an RF scan gun

🟢Requirements:
- Previous warehouse experience preferred; willing to train the right candidate
- Comfortable using or learning pallet jacks and RF scanners
- Reliable with strong attention to detail

🟢Benefits:
- Weekly pay
- Overtime available
- Referral program
- Hands-on training provided

✅Apply Now!
Call or text to apply: 330-716-5076

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. We're currently on week 59!

Let's jump into it,

Somebody paid $3.78 million to skip the line in Panama

Daily auctions for August transit slots through the Panama Canal's Panamax locks have averaged about $1.1 million, more than sixteen times what the same slots went for a year ago. Auctions for the larger Neopanamax locks are averaging around $2.5 million, the highest on record, with individual slots since late July hitting $3.78 million.

Two things are squeezing at once, and they're unrelated.

The first is water. The canal runs its locks on fresh water from Gatun Lake, which is currently below its long-run average, and Argus expects it to keep dropping. A strengthening El Niño tends to bring drought to Central America, and the Panama Canal Authority has already imposed three draft restrictions on the Panamax locks in the past month, with the permitted draft scheduled to fall to 47.5 feet by September 3, down from the usual 50. Fewer drafts mean less cargo per vessel and a longer queue behind it. On August 3, 113 ships were waiting for a transit slot. On January 2, there were 40.

The second is oil. The Strait of Hormuz has been disrupted since the U.S. and Israel-led bombardment of Iran began on February 28. That waterway normally carries about a fifth of global oil flows, so Asian buyers have been sourcing crude and refined products from the U.S. Gulf Coast instead, and the shortest way from the Gulf Coast to Asia runs through Panama. Energy cargo is now competing for the same slots as everything else.

Most large carriers book transit slots well in advance at fixed rates that bear no resemblance to these numbers, and only up to 30% of canal traffic goes through the daily auction. The Panama Canal Authority has characterized the million-dollar payments as temporary market fluctuations rather than a general fee increase. So the auction figure isn't a bill anyone's container is paying. It's a read on how badly some operators need to move right now, and it's the same signal that preceded the 2023 restrictions.

What this means for you: If you have clients importing to East Coast or Gulf ports on all-water services, this is the week to ask their forwarders about canal surcharges and transit buffers rather than the week the surcharge shows up. Draft restrictions cut container capacity per sailing, and that shortfall gets recovered somewhere on the invoice. The thing to watch is which pressure eases first, because a drought story resolves when it rains and an oil-routing story doesn't. If your inventory planning assumes normal all-water transit times into the fall, build in slack now and be honest with brands about it before they commit to a promo calendar.

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Fewer people are stealing your freight, and it's costing much more

Verisk CargoNet logged 677 supply chain theft incidents in Q2, down 26% from a year ago and 14% from Q1. Estimated losses over the same period went from $135.7 million to $304.6 million.

The average theft with a reported commodity value came in at $564,009, though CargoNet is upfront that a handful of extreme losses dragged that figure around. The plain reading is that much of the low-effort volume theft has dried up, while a smaller group has gotten much better at picking targets. Keith Lewis, who runs operations at CargoNet, put it as groups that aren't trying to steal more freight, just trying to identify the right shipment.

What they're picking is specific. Metal theft rose from 54 to 80 incidents, with copper still the favorite and aluminum, nickel, and tungsten climbing. Enterprise computer and networking equipment stayed a priority, along with crypto mining hardware, and CargoNet makes the point that matters for anyone touching this freight: these loads can be worth millions, and they move through the network as ordinary dry goods, with paperwork and a security profile that don't reflect what's inside. Meanwhile, beverage and grocery theft fell off sharply, auto parts and tires dropped, and seafood went up by eleven events, which is its own strange little trend.

The decline came mostly from two things going away. Fewer criminals are buying up legitimate motor carriers to book freight under a clean operating authority and then disappear with it, and there was less organized theft of unattended loaded trailers, especially in California, Texas, South Florida, and Dallas-Fort Worth. Straight theft events dropped from 488 to 378. Fictitious pickups barely moved, 165 down to 158.

Business email compromise is still the front door. One set of credentials gives someone shipment data, contact directories, and access to a TMS, enough to identify a valuable load, impersonate a party everyone already trusts, and reroute it while it looks completely normal to the broker, the carrier, and the receiver. If that sounds familiar, it's the same mechanic behind the Ceva intrusion we covered two weeks ago.

Now put Landstar next to that. On its July earnings call, VP and chief safety and operations officer Matt Miller disclosed that the company has cut its approved carrier pool from more than 100,000 in mid-2022 to roughly 64,600 today. That's a 35% reduction, over 35,000 carriers removed, and it dropped another 7% year-over-year in Q2 after a 19% cut in Q1. Overdrive reported that the effort began in response to cargo theft and freight fraud, with identity checks and tighter compliance measures layered on.

It ends up somewhere else. The Supreme Court's May decision in Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II broadened broker liability for carrier selection, and CFO Jim Todd said plainly that cases that used to be dismissed on federal preemption grounds must now be litigated. Landstar took $10.5 million in unfavorable prior-year claims adjustments in Q2, with three of the five responsible claims coming out of brokerage. CEO Frank Lonegro is asking federal regulators for clearer vetting standards, which is what a company says when it has spent four years building a process and would like everyone else held to the same one.

The market seems to be pricing it as an advantage. Landstar's insurance renewal on June 1 came in with auto liability flat and broker liability up about 3%, which is a soft outcome for a post-Montgomery renewal. Agent inquiries have picked up since the ruling landed, including an $18 million Midwest brokerage that signed on as an independent agent. And this is all happening in a tightening truckload market, with Lonegro describing capacity as having tightened significantly and conditions moving in favor of the provider for the first time since late 2022. Landstar's truck revenue rose 19% to $1.33 billion on 2% load growth, so essentially all of it came from rates.

What this means for you: If you broker, understand what the Landstar number implies: tens of thousands of carriers got dropped by one of the most established networks in the country, and they are calling somebody, and that somebody has a real chance of being you. On the theft side, the exposure isn't the yard; it's the inbox. BEC is now the access point for most sophisticated schemes, making carrier fraud an IT problem your ops team inherits. And if you handle metals, enterprise hardware, or anything with a fast resale market, the freight needs a security profile that matches its value rather than its BOL.

Nobody ordered many more robots. They spent 21% more anyway

The Association for Advancing Automation put out its Q2 numbers, and the interesting part isn't the unit count.

North American companies ordered 8,940 robots in the second quarter, worth $622 million. Units were up 4.3% from a year ago. Order value was up 21.3%. Run that out, and the average robot ordered this quarter cost around $70,000, up from roughly $60,000 a year earlier. Buyers aren't adding volume so much as buying up the stack, integrating into bigger systems rather than adding another arm to the line.

The first half totaled 17,995 units and $1.166 billion, a 2% increase in units and 6.6% in value. Underneath that flat-looking topline, the customer base is shifting hard. Automotive OEM orders fell 25% in the first half, which historically would have dragged the whole market down. It didn't, because semiconductors and electronics ordered 35% more units, life sciences and pharma 32%, automotive components 24%, and food and consumer goods 17%. Non-automotive buyers were 56% of Q2 units. A3's Alex Shikany framed it as the market mix continuing to evolve, which is the polite version of saying Detroit stopped being the whole story.

Two caveats before you take that to a client meeting. A3 counts industrial robot orders across all of manufacturing, so this isn't a warehouse automation number, even though it’s reported as one. And these are orders, not installations, so they reflect decisions made a couple of quarters ago.

The piece that does translate is collaborative robots. Companies ordered 2,774 cobots in the first half, totaling $114 million, which accounts for 15.4% of all units but less than 10% of the dollars. That gap is the whole point. Cobots are the cheap, fast, low-infrastructure end of the market, and adoption is concentrated where the work is fiddly and high-mix: they were 43.7% of life sciences orders and 36.5% of semiconductor and electronics orders.

For context on the demand side, companies bought more than 36,700 robots last year, the most since 2022, and Interact Analysis found that 92% of surveyed companies plan to increase automation spending this year. GXO has invested close to a billion dollars in automating its buildings over the past five years. Amazon signed a warehouse automation supply agreement with AutoStore on undisclosed terms, which is notable mainly because Amazon builds most of its own robotics, and going outside for cube storage suggests it isn't trying to build everything twice.

What this means for you: The per-unit price is moving against you, so any automation quote you're sitting on has a shorter shelf life than you'd think, and a proposal you priced six months ago probably isn't the proposal you get today. If capex has been the reason you keep passing, cobots are the honest entry point rather than a compromise, and the industries adopting them fastest are the ones with messy, variable, high-mix work, which describes most multi-client fulfillment floors. And with 92% of companies planning to spend more, expect the automation question to move from a nice differentiator to a table-stakes item in RFPs.

QUICK HITS

U.S. retail sales came in at $763.6 billion in July, down 0.6% from June, according to Commerce Department data, after June managed a 0.2% gain. The pullback is consistent with what warehouse operators have been describing all summer: retailers pulled inventory forward into May and June ahead of tariff deadlines and then went quiet. One soft month isn't a trend, but if your Q4 volume forecasts were built on spring order patterns, this is a reason to check them against what your clients are actually receiving right now.

Teamsters California sued the state DMV on August 5 to block heavy-duty autonomous truck permits. The 34-page complaint in Alameda County Superior Court asks the court to set aside the regulations the DMV adopted on April 28, which removed the ban on autonomous vehicles rated over 10,001 pounds. The legal argument is procedural rather than philosophical: the union says the DMV skipped a Standardized Regulatory Impact Assessment that state law requires for any rule with more than $50 million in first-year economic impact, and that it puts more than 200,000 California semi-truck driving jobs at risk. Peter Finn of Teamsters California framed the safety case around trucks up to sixteen times heavier than a robotaxi at highway speeds. The stakes are high because California matters to developers, as the state handles 40% of the nation's containerized imports and 30% of exports.

Fura acquired High Rise Logistics, its seventh deal. The Cincinnati broker is running a straightforward roll-up thesis: buy established books, move them onto a shared AI platform for bidding, carrier sales, and visibility, and skip the overhead stacking that usually kills these strategies. High Rise, out of Vancouver, Washington, brings flatbed, expedited, truckload, and LTL along with intermodal, drayage, and warehousing, plus a real Pacific Northwest footprint. Leadership stays on to run daily operations. Terms undisclosed. If you own a regional brokerage or an asset-light 3PL, this is the second consecutive week with the same buyer profile, and the pattern is consistent: they want your customers and your team, and they're bringing the technology.

JOB BOARD

Title: VP of Warehouse Operations
Company: Ardmore Home Design
Location: Hacienda Heights, California, US
Salary: $170,000 - $200,000
Apply Here

Title: General Manager - Fulfillment
Company: iDrive Fulfillment
Location: Phoenix, Arizona, US
Salary: $90,000 - $120,000
Apply Here

Title: Refrigerated Warehouse Operations Manager
Company: The Judge Group
Location: Dallas, Texas, US
Salary: $90,000 - $115,000
Apply Here

Title: Fulfillment Operations Manager
Company: Fringe Sport
Location: Austin, Texas, US
Salary: $80,000 - $85,000
Apply Here

Title: Warehouse Manager
Company: RYSE Up Sports Nutrition
Location: Prosper, Texas, US
Salary: $75K-85K
Apply Now

Title: Senior Supply Chain Coordinator
Company: HR Annie Consulting
Location: Portland, Oregon, US
Salary: $70,000 - $80,000
Apply Here

Title: Assistant Fulfillment Operations Manager
Company: Fulco Fulfillment
Location: Dover, New Jersey, US
Salary: $55,000 - $70,000
Apply Here

Full list of job openings →

_______________________________________________________________________

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?!

I spent years working warehouses — pick/pack, receiving, dispatch, forklifts, inventory systems — and I kept bouncing off idle games where the theme is a skin over numbers that could belong to anything. So I made one where the theme is the mechanics.

AI Disclosure

Generative AI was used. It wrote the majority of the code, and assisted with balance simulation and some of the store listing copy. The game design, the economy structure, the progression decisions, the warehouse domain knowledge it's built on, and all playtesting and release work are mine. I directed every change and made the calls on what shipped.

What it is:

Eight equipment tiers that unlock in the order you'd actually meet them: hand picking, pallet trolley, counterbalance forklift, reach truck, conveyor line, sorting robot, automated crane, distribution hub.

Every 25 units of the same equipment doubles that tier's output, so there's a real reason to go deep rather than wide.

Prestige is selling the business for Reputation. Managers and career rank survive; equipment doesn't.

Career ranks run from Casual Hand up through the

ladder, and contracts are timed jobs that scale with how many you've completed.

Pallets are a soft currency from achievements, rush orders, promotions and a daily delivery. They buy permanent perks — a bigger offline cap, more frequent

rush orders, better tap value — plus consumables and site liveries.

How it was made:

Single HTML file, hand-rolled, no engine, wrapped with Capacitor. About 105KB.

Works fully offline.

I built a headless simulator that runs the economy without the UI, which caught three balance bugs manual play never would have — including one where a capacity figure was fixed while the demand racing it scaled exponentially, so the whole system broke at high equipment counts.

What the closed test changed:

Twelve testers, fourteen days. Nobody reached prestige, which told me the gate was badly placed — first prestige went from ~75 minutes to ~25. Five asked for clearer direction, so there's a task card on the main screen showing one objective at a time. Two reported lag in long sessions, which turned out to be the UI redrawing every screen ten times a second including hidden ones.

Monetisation, since people reasonably ask

Rewarded video only. You opt in for a temporary boost or doubled offline earnings. No banners, no interstitials, no forced breaks, no IAP. The game iscomplete without watching a single ad.

No accounts, no sign-in, no data

collection.

What's next:

A site network, where each prestige commissions a new site — cold storage, dangerous goods, e-commerce fulfilment, bonded warehouse — each with real mechanical differences, and previously run sites keep earning in the background. Prestige should build something rather than just resetting.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.abdulgames.warehouseempire

Happy to answer anything about the economy or the build.