And that metric was essentially in alignment with the 10-year average or rather the adjusted average that reflects – good Friday being in March. So it’s good to see that we’re finally seeing month-over-month improvement there versus I’ve mentioned before from April of ’22 through December, we were kind of in a declining environment and then just flat from December at 47,000 shipments per day, December ’22, all the way to August when we had the big industry event and that acceleration that we saw pretty much a step function change that happened on an immediate basis.
Jason Seidl: Makes sense. Appreciate the answers. Thanks, guys.
Operator: The next question comes from Brian Ossenbeck of JPMorgan. Please go ahead.
Brian Ossenbeck: Thanks. I appreciate taking the question here. So Adam, I just wanted to ask a little bit more about how you view the truckload market here. I know in the past, you said you thought some of the freight moved over. I think you mentioned it earlier. But how much of that went over, I guess, with the disruption with yellow, — do you still think that can come back to LTL and tighten it up. So is that kind of above and beyond what you normally see from a cyclical perspective? And maybe on a related topic, are you seeing anything interesting in terms of April, weight per shipment? Is that sort of a leading indicator that you’re watching to see for early signs of stabilization improvement? Thank you.
Marty Freeman: Yes. This is Marty. I agree with Adam, that some of this yellow freight did move over to full truckload carriers in the form of stop-offs where they take 3 or 4 shipments, along with a 75% load and charge a couple of hundred bucks to do stockpiles. They don’t really like to do that nor do their drivers like to do it, but I do believe this moved over there because of the slowness in the truckload market this year and last year. And I also agree that this will move back to LTL carriers once the truckload market picks back up. So – and I suspect that will happen at the same time the LTL market starts to flourish again. So that will come straight back to the LTL market.
Brian Ossenbeck: Thanks. Any thoughts on weight per shipment and how that’s trending and how we should expect that throughout the rest of the year?
Adam Satterfield: Yes. We hope to see it continue to increase. That’s typically an indicator of an improving economy as well. And like I mentioned, that an increase from February to March. It’s increased a little bit from March thus far into April as well. So that’s something that we’re probably on the low end of the scale in terms of how that metric changes. It got a little skewed, if you will, with post yellow and some of the incremental rent that we saw there. But historically speaking, in a strong demand environment, we’ve been closer to 1,600 pounds as an overall average. We’re still down around 1,515 pounds. And so we definitely have got some room to grow there. And that, too, creates and that’s part of the leverage that you get from an operating ratio standpoint is weight continues to increase, you’re getting more revenue per shipment, and that will help overall offset and kind of close that gap that we’ve seen with cost per shipment over the past years.
The cost, relatively speaking, is – should be very similar, but you’re just getting more weight and more revenue per load, if you will.
Brian Ossenbeck: Okay. Appreciate it. Thank you very much.
Operator: The next question comes from Tom Wadewitz of UBS. Please go ahead.
Tom Wadewitz: Good morning. I wanted to — it seems to me like the — I guess, the freight environment improvement is a key catalyst for what you’re going to see on the tonnage side and give you a chance to benefit from the capacity and service you can offer. What have you seen in terms of industrial customers versus the kind of retail and consumer customers where there’s any kind of difference in behavior or trend or optimism. And I guess related maybe more to the retail side. It’s been surprising that container imports have been pretty strong for a number of months and yet the domestic freight environment seems like it’s still pretty soft. So I don’t know if you have any thoughts on what might be going on there if there’s some inventory. But I guess – any color on differences in customer segments or maybe why the imports aren’t translating to domestic activity so much? Thank you.
Adam Satterfield: Yes. Overall, the retail continued to reflect — or the industrial rather reflect the weakness that we’ve seen in the industrial economy. And in the first quarter, we had 1% revenue growth, but it was actually a slight decrease when you look at just our industrial-related accounts group together. So a little bit better performance on the retail side to offset that in the first quarter. But again, hopefully, that’s something now that we’ve seen ISM trend back above 50, it had been below 50 for 16 months. I mean just this long incredibly slow environment that we’ve been slugging through, but generally speaking, that indicates that improvement in that industrial environment, if we can stay above 50% should be coming, and that could be sort of in that May time frame.
So it’s something that we’ll continue to watch. But the retail continues to perform. We’ve also seen an improvement in the business that’s managed by third-party logistics companies. And that’s kind of in the early stages as well, but seeing some improvement there. I think is a good sign. Oftentimes, the 3PLs that have the systems, they’re able to identify some of those top-off shipments that Marty was referencing earlier by being able to look through their entire inventory of capacity versus shipments. And so if we’re starting to see some growth there again with those than maybe some of that type of truckload versus LTL swing might start reversing course. But again, I think it’s just a lot of things are kind of in the early stages that we got to keep watch on and don’t want to get overly caught up in and – but keep our fingers on the poles, if you will, and continue to watch the trends and see if it manifests into increased LTL demand overall for which I think that we will more than be able to win our share.
