But when you look at our Logistics business, for example, one that had an 86.4% operating ratio despite the fact that load volumes were down almost 19%. And you got to remember, when you have a Logistics business, but you also have such a large asset-based business, there’s going to be probably a little support — normally, the loads would flow the other way, but there might be a little bit more support that business. But you look at our power-only volumes, and those were down 14%. But our gross margin continued to be very strong, 22.1%. So there’s some value that’s been created there. There’s customers giving us opportunities when, I would say, other logistics firms are struggling to break even. We’ve been able to enjoy nice margin, hold on to volumes, and I think that’s because we create more value with the trailer pool.
So I think those are connected. I think we see that in our logistics. We clearly see that on the asset-based side of things. And so I do think that that’s a little bit of a different — that’s a different behavior in the past. I mean, if we go back to pre-ELDs, the playbook for this kind of environment was very predictable. You would see shippers would move towards very large non-asset-based brokers who would come in offer, in many cases, double-digit rate declines. They would win massive volumes, and then they would execute. They would go find anybody and any carrier that could haul those, and there were people that were willing to do that at discounted prices given the difficulty in the market. And in many cases, it appears that some of those smaller carriers that maybe didn’t have ELDs would figure out how to run more miles to stay alive in difficult times.
Well, we have ELDs today, which regulate and are effective in enforcement of the hours of service rules. So you can’t just go extend the day. You can’t run more miles to make up for the fact that maybe you’re not making as much. And likewise, our shippers, they can’t just rely on that flexible group to wait around to be live loaded and live unloaded when a truck and a trailer and a driver show up. And they have to — and the warehouse has to figure out how to stop what they’re doing and unload it as opposed to for us can drop the trailer, and they can get to it hopefully within a day or 2. And so in this ELD world where you can’t extend the day, if you will, they have to be paid if they’re detained. And if you’re detained more than two hours, even the smallest of carriers have to be compensated for that.
And so that changes the economics tremendously. So I think from — those are just a couple of reasons why we think it creates so much value, and we’re definitely seeing that pull through. I think that if you look at the last 12 months of contract rates, not just for us but based on some of the industry data, what you’ll find is those rates are not down much, somewhere mid-single-digit rates, generally speaking. And that’s over a very broad group of a very fragmented industry, whereas spot rates declined every single month for 12 consecutive months in 2022. That’s never happened to have such a steep decline in spot rates. And so those rates now are showing signs of a bit of a debt cap bounce, if you will. I mean they’re just kind of bouncing maybe along the bottom.
