Mario Harik: Thanks, Tom. I’ll start by first covering the demand side, and Ali can walk through the cadence in the quarter as well because our comps are not similar to the other carriers in the back half of this year compared to last year. So there are a few things we can drill into it with more details. But if you take a step back on the customer demand side, it is a fluid environment, and it’s hard to call what the macro will do when we look at the demand environment. More recently, the underlying environment has been bouncing along the bottom since the month of April of this year. So it’s been softer demand overall for LTLs. Now in terms of outlook, we do survey our customers on a quarterly basis, our top customers. And even the last survey last week, for the fourth quarter, our customers were more balanced.
So some customers were seeing some strength in demand, while others were seeing softer in demand. But generally, it was balanced in terms of where we were earlier in the year. Heading into 2024, we are hearing more optimism from customers about demand picking up. But again, it’s not a big number, but it’s still — that is more customers that expect a demand pickup versus customers that expect more softness or flat. Now when you look at some of the indices we look at, well, two-thirds of our customers are industrial companies and the ISM manufacturing index is a good proxy that pick up a bit to 49% last month. It’s still under 50%, but it did pick up a bit. And same thing on the retail side, we saw retail sales accelerate to 0.7% month-over-month in September.
And that was also slightly better than expected. So we’re seeing things remain soft, slightly improving with a bit more optimism going to the first half of next year, but it’s still very tough to call the macro at this point. There’s a lot of cross signals here.
Ali Faghri: Good morning, Tom. This is Ali. In terms of the cadence through the quarter, as Mario mentioned, we did have tougher compares in the second half of the year last year as our market share gains were accelerating. So if you look at it on a two-year stack basis, our shipment counts and tonnage both accelerated throughout the third quarter and that two-year acceleration continued into the month of October. Also, if you look at it just on a shipment count basis, we saw our shipment counts improve by more than 1,000 shipments each month of the third quarter from July to September. And then as we moved into October, as we noted, October outperformed seasonality relative to the month of September.
Thomas Wadewitz: One quick follow-up. Do you have any thoughts you can offer on line haul miles and kind of where you’re going in terms of making further gains? You’ve improved that quite a bit with the in-sourcing. Just wondering how you think about the opportunity is going forward. Do you improve a lot from that? I think you said like 21.5% outsourced. Thanks.
Mario Harik: Yes. So for the third quarter, we were outsourced 21.5%, where we in-sourced roughly 200 basis points on a year-on-year basis. Now keep in mind, Tom, it’s something we did invest in on a sequential basis, Q2 to Q3. We did get a bit more third-party line haul miles given the inflection in volume. But moving forward, we expect to move quickly on in-sourcing. As I mentioned earlier, we are excited about the program we’re launching called the Road Flex operation. It’s a program where we have teams of drivers and sleeper cap trucks that move freight across longer hauls. And this will enable us to move faster on the in-sourcing process. We do expect to be — to in-source at least 50% of the miles by 2027. But given this new program, we’re launching, we expect to accelerate that over the quarters and years to come here.
Operator: Thank you. Next question comes from the line of Ravi Shanker with Morgan Stanley. Please proceed with your questions
