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Comment by dymk | Hacker News Reader

The company was an unmitigated shitshow for a long time, and didn't perform its basic duties as a shipper. I've had LTL shipments lost for weeks at a time with nothing but a shrug and an "It'll (maybe) get there when it gets there".

So it doesn't surprise me at all that they couldn't reach an agreement with their labor.

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This mirrors my experience. Not once did I have a Yellow LTL shipment arrive on time, and typical delays ranged from 2 days to 2 weeks or longer. Shipments would get lost in a terminal, down to staff insisting it never arrived on the trailer, and then spontaneously reappear after a loss claim was filed.

I would've loved to avoid them but vendors would often choose them due to their cost.

It's very difficult to implement radical change in an organization when unions prevent you from firing low performers w/o exorbitant costs.

You see this across the public sector where it's practically impossible to get fired unless you do something egregious.

Lots of union defenders here ignoring that unions make reform impossible.

The problem isn't the unions. If you've interacted with Yellow you'd know that. It's that the company is disorganized and management is nowhere to be found.

Look at UPS - union shop, going strong. Management is organized. Company is doing fine.

UPS is not a comparable company.

No true union, I guess

It's amazing to me that in 2023 when the small-package industry (USPS, UPS, FedEx) is SO SO SO highly optimized that I have a choice of 3 carriers to get a box across the country in 1-2 days and by and large it works pretty darn well, and yet if a company wants to ship a pallet the same place, the logistics fall apart into garbage "it'll get there when it gets there."

I know FedEx and UPS offer freight services, but it doesn't sound like they're dominant or close to it in the industry. Why didn't they put Yellow and the likes in the ground years ago?

There is a very big difference in price. Slow unreliable shipping is something that established companies know how to deal with, while many of them don’t know how to get a positive ROI out of paying more for freight.

Of course, the fact that Yellow has shut down suggests that may not be as true as it once was.

Sounds like Schroedinger's shipment. If we don't know where it is, can it really be lost?

Isn't that the definition of something being lost, i.e., not knowing where it is?

Can you lose something if you never knew where it was to begin with?

No. Not really.

Where it is may be where it's supposed to be. Not knowing that doesn't make it lost.

Ex: If I send a ship to sea before we had radio/telegraph, I may not know where it is at any given point, but it's not lost and I don't need to go find it.

It's lost when it misses a check-in, and what constitutes a check-in is really company/org dependent.

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