Every time a giant like Amazon takes more control of the freight market, the reaction is the same: "Look at all that volume." And every time, that's the wrong thing to celebrate. More load volume does not mean better business.
We already ran this experiment. Uber Freight had the technology, the capital, the shipper relationships, and even bought Transplace — and it still proved that just because you put loads on a platform, it doesn't mean the economics work. Volume was never the hard part. Making the volume pay is.
So when Amazon's network starts offering you freight, the question isn't how many loads they have. It's whether those loads make sense for your truck after fuel, deadhead, facility dwell time, payment terms, claim exposure, commodity risk, and coverage requirements. A platform can be flooded with freight and still be a bad deal for the carrier hauling it.
My worry with the Amazon model is simple: that it doesn't respect the economics and the risk of the carrier. Big networks are very good at generating volume and very good at pushing cost and risk downward. The operators who win aren't the ones who chase every load — they're the ones who can tell the difference between a busy truck and a profitable one.