If you’ve tried to move a truckload of stone in the past six months, the quotes probably left you scratching your head. Prices jumped in a year when the economy stayed soft, and the number you got one week was gone the next. Freight is supposed to ease when things cool off. It went the other way.
Start with what you already know. Stone is one of the hardest categories to ship. It’s dense, heavy, and often oversized, so it maxes out weight limits and rides on flatbeds that need the right equipment and careful loading. Whatever happens in the wider trucking market hits your category first and hardest.
Flatbed has been especially tight this year. Construction, steel, and energy keep those trailers busy no matter what the rest of the economy is doing, and rates have run well above last year, nearing record levels. When steel and lumber demand surges, those shippers grab the same trailers your stone rides on, and your quote moves even though your product never sat on anyone’s list.
Underneath that is the shift that actually moves the baseline. Many trucks are leaving, and they are not coming back the way they used to. Starting late last year, federal enforcement began pulling drivers off the road over licensing and English-proficiency rules. So far that’s only a couple percent of the drivers who haul freight like ours, but freight runs on a thin margin between the trucks available and the loads that need them. When that margin is tight, a small cut in trucks pushes prices up hard. In past slowdowns, trucks got parked and waited, then came back the moment rates recovered. The capacity leaving now is going for compliance reasons a higher rate does not fix, and enforcement could pull hundreds of thousands of drivers out of the pool over the next two to three years. You can see the pressure in one number: freight priced on the open market climbed above contracted freight this summer, the first time since early 2022. If you’ve been holding out for last year’s rates, they probably are not coming back.
WSS has handled shipping and logistics for years, and most of our largest customers already lean on us for it. What’s changed is that with the market moving the way it is, a lot more dealers are asking us to take it off their hands.
It surprised us at first too, since you’d expect the biggest operations to have the most pull with carriers. We move flatbeds of stone every week, which gives us the lanes, the carrier relationships, and the volume to keep trucks rolling when a shipper who books freight once in a while gets left waiting. In a market this tight, that access is worth real money. And when you’re bringing in plants, irrigation, aggregate, soil, and stone, freight turns into a coordination job spread across your whole order sheet. Letting us carry the stone piece hands the crew that moves stone all day the part they run best, so your attention stays on the work only you can do.
When you buy from WSS, the call is yours. Arrange your own freight if your lanes are dialed in, or let us take one loud, unpredictable variable off your plate. More dealers are choosing that this year, and once you’ve seen the market up close, it’s not hard to see why.
Want freight quoted on your next order? Contact your sales rep to price delivery on the stone you need.