Some shippers are heading into peak season with the bid strategy that carried them from 2022 through 2025: long rate locks, steep penalties and little flexibility. That strategy is breaking down in a tighter market, said Craig Lough, director of strategic planning at A. Duie Pyle, who leads the company’s non-asset brokerage division.
Lough has worked in freight since 2003. Pyle is a family-owned carrier based in West Chester, Pennsylvania, that has been expanding its LTL network beyond the Northeast. He said the mismatch is leaving loads uncovered and asking brokers to price more than a year of rate risk into some bids.
The peak season capacity tightness that is invalidating last year’s playbook comes in the form of persistently elevated outbound tender rejection rates. The FreightWaves SONAR Tender Rejection Index held near 13.9% in mid-October, compared with under 6% during peak season 2025, as truckload capacity showed no signs of recovering.
As many of the shippers are still running those playbooks, the routing guide is already bleeding freight, Lough said.
“They’re sticking to the old, ‘You’ve got to sign up long-term, there’s no flexibility,’ but then they’re on the market asking for additional capacity,” he told FreightWaves in an Oct. 8 interview.
Bid terms stretch past a year
Lough has seen bids that lock rates for a month and adjust for fuel, and others that hand brokers lane data five months before go-live, then ask them to hold rates for a year after it.
“So, you’re talking like a 17- to 18-month risk profile in probably either the first or second most volatile market that we’ve seen this century,” he said.
The shippers asking for the longest terms are getting what Lough called paper rates from a good share of the capacity bidding on them.
Lough sorts shippers into two camps: collaboration and consequences. Some shippers open by saying where they need capacity and are struggling. Others lead with fines. He described one bid that opened with a 98% tender acceptance expectation and a $1,000 fine for late delivery.
Other bids remove providers from the routing guide if they decline freight below a set threshold.
“What works in a falling market is a giant red flag in a tightening point,” Lough said.
Some shippers accept weaker service for lower prices
Price-focused shippers are showing a higher pain tolerance, trading weaker service from other providers for lower prices, Lough said. Some may have locked their own customers into full-year prices built on old freight costs before the market flipped.
Pyle has priced loads on a Monday that a shipper wanted moved that day, then seen the same load still posted by other brokers Tuesday and Wednesday, he said.
Quote requests arrive without lane details
Lough has seen more rate requests from shippers Pyle’s brokerage has never spoken with, often with no interest in a discovery call about shipping hours, consignees or delivery windows. When he asked for more information, some stopped responding.
“I think you have some supply chain professionals that started in a loose market and haven’t really had those collaborative conversations before,” he said.
Small carriers that miss standards seek freight
In the three weeks before the interview, Lough said, small carriers had been contacting Pyle “left and right” asking to haul its freight, and they did not pass its standards.
He read that as a sign that other companies had tightened their carrier standards and pushed that capacity back onto the market. Enforcement is also pulling drivers out: English-language proficiency enforcement puts about 2,700 drivers out of service a month, according to FreightWaves SONAR data.
“The fact that these carriers are coming out of the woodwork, to me, that means somebody somewhere, and probably multiple companies, have tightened their standards and started to force this capacity back onto the market. So, in essence, I almost think that there’s two markets that are going on right now,” Lough said.
Pyle is seeing significant pricing premiums into areas with traditionally heavier enforcement, he said. Pricing tools don’t capture them, because Pyle’s carrier standards cost more on those lanes.
Pyle pairs long-term carriers with spot capacity
Pyle moves part of its freight on carriers locked in for extended time periods, Lough said.
“We have some lanes that carriers have been running for us for eight years,” he said.
Pyle also moves spot freight, and some carriers make a living playing that market. Some brokers don’t like those carriers.
“To me, as long as they have the correct standards and they’re a good qualified carrier, they serve a vital part of the market because at the end of the day, whoever needs the truck the most is going to pay that carrier the most and ultimately get it moved,” he said.
Carriers with strong reputations are not hauling at the prices they took two or three years ago, Lough said.
Advice for shippers heading into peak
Lough said relationships are absolutely key.
Lough’s advice for shippers before peak starts with phone calls, video meetings and in-person visits with carriers and brokers, centered on service and capacity. A lot of shippers are still talking about price, he said, but the conversations should also include service and capacity. “We understand price is important, but if you’re sending out lists of loads every day at 11 o’clock in the morning that aren’t covered, what are you going to do here?” he said.
He has also pitched a transparent cost-plus model, in which Pyle shows a shipper what it pays the carrier and adds a markup. If a shipper is targeting $1,000, the broker can report back on whether that price works or if the market is demanding $1,200 or $1,300. No shipper has taken it yet, he said.
“In a fluctuating market where a shipper is wondering, ‘Am I getting a good deal or not?’ If you actually trust a partner to do that cost-plus type model, that could be very advantageous, or you can work together.”
Lough warned against blast emails to lists of about 50 carriers and shippers, because recipients see 50 other people going after the load, and in tight markets those lists get less attention. A couple of months before the interview, he saw a single lane from Baltimore to a remote New England location posted 41 times by 27 brokers on load boards. He wrote about it on LinkedIn and called it an extreme example.
Even three or four brokers on one load can mislead a shipper, he said. Carriers call each broker in turn, and each broker brings the shipper a slightly higher number. In Lough’s example, a shipper who holds out until 3 p.m. finds that the truck offered at $1,100 that morning now wants $1,400.
“In reality, it’s just the same truck making offers to four brokers,” Lough said.
Lough wants shippers talking with carriers and brokers before Thanksgiving. Northeast freight gets harder every year from then until January, he said, as winter weather stacks on top of peak demand.
“If you have that human relationship and are having the conversation, that carrier or broker is probably going to be more likely to say, ‘You know what, I’m going to go ahead and accept this load instead of taking another one from a different provider,'” he said.
Why it matters: Shippers that bid long and price tight are betting capacity returns before their contracts reprice. With enforcement still pulling drivers out of service, that bet pushes freight onto the spot market, where duplicate postings and late-day quotes raise what they pay.
