by Wolf Richter
Wolf Street
Amid transportation chaos & delays, high demand, soaring diesel prices, and labor shortages.
Shippers in the US – from manufacturers to mom-and-pop online retailers – have been wailing about it all year in 2021, and it got worse as the year went on: Surging shipping costs. Freight companies, facing numerous obstacles, jacked up prices amid strong demand. And the result is a historic spike in the amount that shippers paid to transportation companies.
The total these shippers spent in December on shipping goods to their customers in the US spiked by 43.6% from December 2020 and by 62.3% from December 2019, according to the Cass Freight Index for Expenditures, released by Cass Information Systems.