https://www.railwayage.com/regulatory/so-what-do-rail-shippers-really-want/
Guest author discusses competition, Staggers and competitive access.
They want what we want when we go shopping on the net - FREE SHIPPING!
It neither states or implies that.
They may use weasel words - but it is what they WANT - they don’t expect to get it, but it is what they want. If they don’t WANT free shipping, they don’t have the proper motivation in doing their jobs.
Nice to know you have taken up mind reading.
Damn I’ve only been a people for 72+ years - if you don’t want FREE, you aren’t a people.
Wanting and reasonably expecting are two different things in the human condition.
I spent 40 years as a rail shipper and don’t believe I ever spoke to a fellow rail shipper who expected free transportation. In fact most of the folks I interacted with acknowledged the need for a profitable rail industry as that was the only way to generate sufficient capital to reinvest in the railroads.
As the number of railroads has shrunk the manner in which railroads choose to interact with their customers has worsened.
When BaltACD’s alma mater implemented PSR; service went all to hell almost overnight. Loaded transit times on lanes that had been 10-12 days doubled or tripled. Because of delays in receiving raw materials or empty private cars needed for loading; production curtailments were necessary for many companies. In order to avoid shutting customers down; many shippers resorted to more expensive emergency trucking. Despite it unquestionably being their fault, CSX never offered to reimburse one damn cent of all this additional cost. In addition; empty cars returning from customers were sent on wildly circuitous return routings that resulted in a dramatic increase in excess empty mileage charges. And many of these circuitous empty return routings have stayed in place costing rail shippers thousands of additional dollars in mileage penalties.
When NS decided to implement precision scheduled nonsense earlier this year; they decided that customers should accept seven day a week service even if we were not staffed for it or our union contracts would not allow us the latitude to adjust loading schedules to benefit in any manner from the increased frequency. Concurrent with that; NS essentially eliminated free time on private cars meaning that demurrage began practically as soon as a car arrived and was CP’d. (I firmly believe NS’ dramatic improvement in terminal dwell is a direct result of this immediate constructive placement. When a car is CP’d it no longer shows in NS’ terminal dwel
We are all a part of the ‘something for nothing world’. We may not expect it, but we all want it. Anything else is disowning human nature.
I freely admit my former employer is doing their best to run their customers into the ground using almost all forms of bad service and deflection of responsibility that has become the credo of the USA today. They are using the business theory ‘we have them by the short hairs, raise the rates and diminish the service’. They can always go somewhere else - ha ha ha!
Again, Precision Scheduled Railroading is not that at all. Its correct name is Asset Utilization Railroading. The other form of railroading is Customer Responsive Railroading. Either can be done with precision or sloppily.
The sloppyness of CSX caused the Amtrak derailment. You simply do not remove a proven nearly fool-proof safety measure one week before installing its state-of-art replacement and run trains as if the safety measure is still in place.
With computer technology, Customer-Responsive-Railroading can be just as efficient as Assett-Utilization-Railroading, but the right computer tools still await application.
I think that is what the author of the posted article is referring to when he says, “Entities with substantial market power are generally regulated because competition is not fully effective.”
Balt’s tongue-in-cheek (I think) summation may not be on the mark, but it’s one extreme of the freight rate “battle.” For shippers, it’s “how cheaply can my cargo be carried?”, for the railroads (and other carriers) it’s “how much can I get away with charging?”
The truth, of course, is somewhere in the middle. It’s the where in the middle that’s the source of battles, and always has been.
Sarcasm or simply embittered, that attitude is a reflection of an inability by his former railroad to run a decent business. In a non-competitive environment, some business entities revert to the robber baron methodology. That’s why, in the US at least, regulation of railroads was needed.
Perhaps the saddest thing is that our current generation of ‘pundits’ seem to have forgotten the extended meaning of that tired old phrase “charge what the traffic will bear”. What we have instead is kinda like the old black-and-white logical fallacy: one side wants as low-cost and perfect a shipping ‘experience’ as possible, while the other wants to leave no penny on the table for providing the least amount of actual work it can ‘schedule’. With “negotiation” - probably protracted and acrimonious - the thing that results in any sort of consensus, or finding the ‘where in the middle’.
Cordwainer Smith was right: let’s watch men and women working with a wild will to build a more imperfect world. Just as silly now as it was in 1961.
It’s an opinion piece. Hardly controversial. (except to the legends in their own minds)
We have reached the stage of human existence wherein those low income individuals with Type 1 Diabetes, thanks to current drug manufacturers pricing at ‘what the market will bear’ on the price of insulin can’t afford to continue to live.
The first time my wife had breast cancer; the weekend before she began chemo treatment; I went to the pharmacy to pick up a couple prescriptions ordered by her oncologist. As I was checking out; I noticed the blurb on my receipt “Your plan has saved you $5000”.
I have jokingly told friends it was at that moment I “became a Democrat” as I realized without medical insurance; it would almost be a death sentence to a critically ill person.
In a serious vein, that’s what you get when practitioners of the Vienna School of economic theory, aka, survival of the richest, is sold like the snake oil it is to an unwary public. Sad.
Absurdly high priced medical service and drugs is what you get when there is no competition. If you had to by groceries with the same model of payment, a gallon of milk would cost $792.21.
Sorry Euc! There is plenty of competition - Pharma A wants to set the price at $5K and Pharma B will prices it’s competing product at $5K - If people still buy it at $5K they will raise the price to $10K.
When the media questions the prices, the pharma talking head say ‘real people’ don’t pay that - that is the price for insurance companies, however if John Doe without insurance goes to a pharmacy for the drug, he must not be ‘real people’ because they are going to get charged the $5K or $10K.
Between ‘Big Medicine’ (hospital groups, doctor groups etc.). Big Pharma (drug makers and packagers) and Big Insurance. Every human being in the USA is being extorted for their own healthcare. The idea being communicated is pay up or die - the choice is yours!