Why Slow Retail Is Trashing Trucking

The ripple effects of a sluggish retail holiday season — exacerbated by unusually warm weather that made inventory hard to move — have started to show up in other industries.

Specifically, trucking, where volumes slowed to a crawl during the first month of 2016 as retailers nationwide continue to work to move those overstocked inventory piles.

According to Wall Street Journal reports, the American Trucking Association figures indicated that seasonally adjusted truck tonnage slipped 1.4 percent in January from December, and was flat when compared to January of 2015. This follows strong November and December performances for the industry, when the ATA was hitting a seasonally adjusted all-time high.

“Clearly, 2016 started soft for truck tonnage,” the ATA’s Bob Costello said in a statement. “The inventory situation continues to weigh on truck freight volumes.”

But, according to the experts, January is looking like more of an outlier than a trend, so far.

“January was very slow but February has picked up,” said Harold Friedman, senior vice president of global corporate development at Data2Logistics, which processes freight payments for retailers and manufacturers. “The warmer weather has had an impact, I think. People weren’t buying winter clothes and they weren’t going skiing, and that has a ripple effect on the economy.”

However, he noted that ultimately the ending of 2015 was unsatisfying from an industry perspective.

“We expected to see more volume by the end of the year than we did. It’s not that we lost customers, but that business with many customers was just slower than we had anticipated,” he said.