Ohio resident Matthew James Collins hauls frozen food around the Midwest — onion rings, ice cream and the like. On a recent October morning, Collins was trucking through a snowstorm in Minnesota.
He wasn’t carrying much. Collins recalled when he ran this route last year, he would regularly move 22 skids of frozen foods (a type of pallet) for four different corporate accounts. Now he’s moving just 12 skids for two clients.
The health of the trucking industry is typically a good gauge for how the...