The freight market lost its mind somewhere between 2022 and now, and nobody bothered sending a search party.
Rates ping-pong between basement levels and “wait, what?” territory within the same week. Capacity predictions change faster than TikTok trends. Half the industry braces for a holiday peak season that might show up with all the enthusiasm of a soggy pretzel. Meanwhile, cargo theft stats climb like they’re training for the Olympics, turning those “great deal” lanes into expensive lessons about why cheap sometimes costs more.
Spot markets throw tantrums. Contract negotiations feel like pulling teeth. Your reliable carriers from last year either vanished or doubled their rates overnight.
But watch the shippers who invested in real end-to-end supply chain visibility. Despite the flat-out “weirdness” of this freight market, they’re not panicking. They catch delays before customers can complain, reroute around problems while competitors are still figuring out what went wrong, and pick carriers based on actual performance data rather than wishful thinking and bulk prayer sessions.
Turns out weird markets don’t make good logistics optional. They just make leaning into the fundamentals all the more important.
What ‘Weird’ Looks Like on the Ground
Weird doesn’t mean abstract market forces and analyst reports. It means your logistics manager walking into Monday morning meetings with strategies that sound completely wild but make perfect sense when you truly understand how bizarre the industry is these days.
FTL Routes Become Liability Magnets
Full truckload shipments turn into sitting ducks on long hauls. Shippers break apart those traditional 1,200-mile direct runs, chopping them into LTL moves plus final-mile delivery instead. Sure, the freight bills look more complicated, but that complexity beats explaining to your CEO why another truck got cleaned out at a truck stop in Memphis. Shorter legs mean fewer opportunities for things to disappear.
Inventory Hides Closer to Home
Distribution centers that worked fine for years suddenly feel too far away. Companies stage inventory in smaller regional hubs, turning those nail-biting 500-mile runs into manageable 50-mile sprints. When your freight only travels an hour instead of a full day, you can actually respond when problems pop up instead of watching helplessly from across three time zones.
Tariff Threats Scramble Everything
Import patterns flip-flop based on whatever trade policy rumors hit the news that week. One month brings panic buying before new duties kick in. The next month shows empty lanes while companies burn through stockpiled inventory. Even seasoned demand planners can’t predict flows that change based on political X (or Truth Social) feeds.
Thin Margins Meet Thick Problems
Every dollar matters when profit margins barely exist and loss risks keep climbing. Companies with solid end-to-end supply chain visibility catch problems while they’re still fixable. Everyone else learns about their issues when customers call asking where their orders went.
How Visibility Is the Non-Negotiable Fundamental
When everything else goes sideways, visibility becomes your lifeline. But we’re talking about real visibility here, the kind that tells you who touched your freight and when, and whether there’s foul play involved. Basic tracking apps that show dots moving across maps worked fine when supply chains followed predictable patterns. Now they’re about as useful as a warehouse with no loading dock.
Beyond Dots on a Map
Real visibility means tracking your chain of custody across every asset, broker, carrier, and mode switch. Your shipment touches more hands now than it used to, especially when you’re splitting loads and forward staging inventory. Each handoff creates another chance for something to go wrong, and those little dots on your tracking screen won’t tell you which driver picked up your freight or whether the warehouse actually scanned it out correctly.
Geofencing Becomes Your Control Center
Geofencing turns into your early warning system. Automatic arrival and departure notifications tell you when trucks hit their stops without playing phone tag with drivers. After-hours movement detection spots trouble when your freight starts moving at 2 a.m. on a Sunday. Dwell time monitoring flags delays before they cascade into customer complaints.
Identity Verification Stops the Fakes
Driver identity verification during tender and pickup blocks impersonation scams and double-brokering schemes that multiply faster than rabbits. Bad actors love chaos because it’s easier to slip fake credentials past overwhelmed dispatchers. Proper verification systems catch these problems at the source instead of discovering them when your freight vanishes into thin air.
More Complexity Means More Risk
Split loads create more attack surfaces. Forward staging adds more handoffs. Every additional step in your new weird-market strategies multiplies the places where things can go wrong. Companies with comprehensive end-to-end supply chain visibility see all these moving pieces working together. Everyone else plays whack-a-mole with problems they should have seen coming.
Cargo Theft: When Prevention Beats Playing Detective
Cargo theft exploded to 2,217 incidents across the United States in 2024. That represents a 49% increase in volume and a 17% jump in average value compared to 2023. Worse? Data so far in 2025 shows the trend accelerating, with 505 incidents in Q1 (up 36% from Q1 2024) and 525 thefts in Q2 (up 33% from Q2 2024).
These aren’t random acts of desperation either. They’re organized operations that exploit predictable weaknesses in freight networks.
But there’s a catch for the bad guys. Cargo theft is fundamentally an operational problem that solid end-to-end supply chain visibility can solve. Thieves succeed when they know more about your freight than you do, but when you turn every mile into a checkpoint that bad actors can’t fake their way through, you gain the upper hand.
Pre-Trip: Lock Down the Starting Line
Verify carrier and driver identity before loads move anywhere. Fake credentials multiply when markets get chaotic, but identity verification systems catch impostors at the source. Geofence your ship-from facilities and alert when unauthorized vehicles enter pickup zones. Lock down pickup numbers and restrict access to confirmed drivers only. Thieves often scout locations for days before striking, so your visibility system should flag unusual activity patterns around facilities immediately.
In-Transit: Build Digital Corridors
Extended dwell times after pickup signal potential trouble, while after-hours motion detection catches loads moving when they shouldn’t be. Sensor tamper alerts tell you the moment someone starts messing with your equipment. Real-time tracking eliminates the information advantage that organized theft rings depend on to operate.
At Nodes: Master the Handoffs
Geofence distribution centers, yards, and gate zones to measure precise entry and exit times. Connect your visibility platform to yard automation systems so legitimate drivers get processed fast and spend minimal time sitting vulnerable in unsecured areas. Quick processing shrinks exposure windows and makes your facilities unattractive targets for organized rings that prefer predictable patterns and long dwell times.
Post-Event: Accelerate Recovery
After an incident, rebuild the shipment’s timeline from your tracking data to speed claims and support law enforcement. Use that movement history to spot theft patterns before they repeat across your network. Companies with end-to-end tracking recover more stolen goods because they can pinpoint exactly when and where incidents occurred. When it’s known that your loads are traceable down to the minute, thieves move on to easier targets.
Playbook for a Flat Market (30/60/90 days)
Flat markets demand surgical precision, not broad strokes. You can’t afford to implement everything at once, but you can’t afford to wait either. That’s why smart operators build end-to-end supply chain visibility in stages, starting with the highest-risk, highest-impact moves and expanding systematically: without breaking the budget or overwhelming their team.
30 Days: Cover Your Biggest Exposure
Geofence your top origins and destinations and known theft hot spots. Set standard alerts for out-of-route moves, extended dwell times, and after-hours motion. Turn on device-agnostic tracking that works with existing telematics, ELD systems, and mobile apps without forcing carriers to install new hardware. Tighten carrier onboarding procedures and document verification steps. Fake credentials multiply when everyone’s scrambling for capacity, so verification systems pay for themselves with the first prevented incident.
60 Days: Build Smart Corridors
Define pre-determined risk zones like ZIP codes, rail yards, ports, and known theft hot spots across your top 10 lanes. Tag each zone as No-Go or High-Risk, and spell out allowed conditions (team drivers, daylight-only moves, seals, secure stops). When a load pings inside one of these zones, trigger a clear gameplan: who gets the first alert, how long until escalation, and who can authorize holding the load at a secure yard or involving law enforcement.
Make mode choices risk-adjusted, not rate-only. For lanes that touch red zones, prefer FTL over LTL consolidation or add mitigation and price it in. That “cheap” path through Memphis gets expensive once you include expected loss from theft.
90 Days: Expand and Optimize
Extend visibility coverage to forward-staged facilities and benchmark dwell times plus on-time performance by node. Integrate yard entry and exit events directly into your dispatch and TMS systems for real appointment performance tracking. Launch quarterly red team reviews that examine attempted thefts and identify process gaps before bad actors find them. Companies with mature end-to-end supply chain visibility programs catch problems that would blindside competitors operating on hope and outdated assumptions.
Proof That the Fundamentals Work
So, does this visibility stuff truly work? Watch the shippers who started building these systems months (if not years) ago. They’re handling the same weird market everyone else faces, but they’re not sweating bullets every time a truck goes quiet for a few hours.
Food and Beverage Shippers Know Where Everything Sits
Food and beverage companies running tight geofences around their DCs and store clusters stopped playing phone tag with drivers who vanish for half a day. Those mystery dwells that used to wreck delivery schedules simply don’t happen as much anymore. When a refrigerated truck sits too long at a truck stop, alerts go off immediately instead of three hours later when the store manager calls asking where their produce went. Replenishment windows tighten up because everyone knows exactly when trucks hit the dock and when they roll out.
Brokers Sleep Better During Weird Pivots
Brokers who built identity checks and route monitoring into their daily workflow discovered something interesting when they started breaking apart FTL loads into multi-stop LTL moves. Those verification systems that seemed like overkill during normal times suddenly became lifesavers. Fake driver schemes that used to slip through during busy periods get caught before trucks leave the gate. When drivers decide to take creative detours through sketchy neighborhoods, phones start buzzing immediately. Customers stick around because their freight shows up where it’s supposed to, when it’s supposed to.
Teams That Drilled During Downtime Own Peak Season
Operations crews who spent quiet months learning every quirk of their visibility systems handle volume explosions without losing their minds. They know the difference between alerts that need immediate phone calls and alerts that can wait until after lunch. When October hits and everyone’s freight suddenly becomes “urgent,” these teams keep loads moving while their competitors get buried under exception reports they don’t understand. Experience beats panic when the phones won’t stop ringing.
Metrics Your CFO and COO Will Care About
Your CFO stopped listening the moment you started talking about “revolutionary tracking capabilities.” They want to know if this stuff saves money or makes money, preferably both. Your COO just wants fewer 6 a.m. panic calls about missing freight. Lucky for you, the right end-to-end supply chain visibility metrics speak their language perfectly.
- Percentage of Loads With End-to-End Tracking: Complete coverage across your freight network matters because blind spots always bite you at the worst possible time. Executives sleep better knowing that every single load has someone watching it from pickup to final delivery, not just the high-value shipments.
- Geofence Arrival Accuracy and Dwell Time Over 120 Minutes: How often your trucks show up when your system predicts they will, plus how many sit around burning time for over two hours after pickup. Extended dwell creates theft windows and wrecks customer delivery promises that took months to negotiate.
- Out-of-Route Events Per 100 Loads and Time to Resolution: Trucks taking creative detours usually mean something’s wrong with your carrier, your driver, or your security. Fast resolution times prove your team catches problems before they turn into customer service nightmares or insurance claims.
- Theft and Claims Cost Per $1 Million Revenue: The bottom-line impact of cargo crime scaled to your business size. When this number starts climbing, it either validates your security spending or screams for better visibility before losses eat your margins alive.
- On-Time to Appointment Performance and Gate-to-Gate Cycle Time: Missed appointments cascade into angry customers and rescheduling fees, while long yard times create bottlenecks that ripple through your entire network. Both problems disappear when you can see exactly where delays start.
Control What You Can Control
You can’t control freight rates bouncing around like ping-pong balls or predict which carrier will ghost you next week. But you can control your fundamentals, and fundamentals win when everything else goes berserk.
Ready to stop playing defense? Start with a free Kestrel Insights 30-minute visibility audit where we map your largest geofencing opportunities.
And, as always, feel free to contact us directly to take the next step in turning your freight network into a competitive advantage.
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