Eighty-five hundred a month

Agility Robotics introduced Digit 5. It carries 50 pounds, 40% more than the last version, runs for 90 minutes on a battery that recharges in 9, and Agility puts that at more than 20 working hours in a 24-hour day. It stands 5 feet 11 inches and reaches 7.2 feet, which covers the top of most pick faces.

Digit 5 runs an independent safety controller alongside AI human detection, so it avoids, stops, or sits down when somebody walks into its space, and it announces what it's about to do with lights and sound. Agility says it's the first humanoid to pass an independent OSHA field evaluation on a live customer production line, which allows it to operate without a cage. Humanoid pilots until now have required the robot to be fenced off from people, and a fence means re-engineering a floor laid out for people.

Forbes puts Agility's order book at more than $300 million, roughly a thousand robots, on a robots-as-a-service model at about $8,500 per unit per month. Against the 20-hour day, that's about $14 an hour. Against a single 8-hour shift five days a week, it's about $49, so the machine only pays if you run it nearly around the clock.

Digit 4 logged more than 65,000 hours with customers including GXO, Schaeffler, Amazon, and Toyota, and, at GXO's Flowery Branch, moved 100,000 totes with roughly 98% accuracy. Two percent of a hundred thousand totes is two thousand exceptions somebody had to touch. Early access starts in the first half of 2027, and general availability comes at the end of it, so nobody is running one this peak or next.

What this means for you: Work out your fully loaded cost per hour for the shift you can't staff, not your average wage, because $14 an hour of machine compares to the overtime and the agency markup you pay in November rather than to your base rate. Identify the job before the machine, since Digit moves totes and tends machines rather than doing anything requiring judgment, and the operations getting value from it have one repetitive task running for many hours a day. Expect humanoids questions hitting in 2027 RFPs.

I'm working with a buyer who wants to acquire a U.S. warehouse operation. They want pallet-heavy volume, and thin margins or a concentrated customer base don't scare them off.

Here's what they're looking for:

- U.S. 3PL or warehousing business with $2M to $25M in revenue
- At least 50% of revenue from pallet moves, storage, cross-docking, or B2B fulfillment, mostly pallet moves. Some domestic transportation management is fine.
- At least one facility of 100,000+ sq. ft., ideally all of them
- Customer concentration, low or negative EBITDA, and margin pressure are all acceptable
- Open to keeping the owner and management running day-to-day, with performance incentives

If that describes your business and you'd be open to a conversation, simply reply to the email or email me at [email protected]

If it's not a fit for you, but you know an operator it describes, I'd appreciate an intro.

FedEx published its 2027 rates. List rates for U.S., export, and import services go up an average of 5.9% on January 4, along with Ground Economy, Ground Multiweight, and the minimum charges on nearly everything. Two weeks later, a $25 paper document fee and a $5 paper air waybill fee land on anyone still handing a driver paperwork.

Ground packages between 1 and 20 pounds go up 6.1% to 6.5%, and 6.7% in the far zones. Since that's the weight band most e-commerce orders fall into, the 5.9% average understates what a normal fulfillment operation pays. Additional handling climbs from 6.8% to 7.6%, the residential extended delivery area charge increases by 9.1%, and oversize in zones 5 and 6 increases from $320 to $345.

On February 1, FedEx reclassifies zones for select domestic origin-destination ZIP pairs. UPS has done this for years, and FedEx hasn't. A lane you've been quoting as zone 4 becomes zone 5 without anybody publishing which lanes moved, so you find out by auditing your own lanes or by reading an invoice in February.

Old Dominion announced a 4.9% increase, effective October 5, covering 559 standard LTL tariffs plus its cubic and fuel schedules, after raising 2026 capex 43% to roughly $380 million. ArcBest was down 5.9% in June.

OnTrac went the other way with a pilot called Dynamic Savings, where a shipper names a target price during rate shopping, and OnTrac's system reads live network conditions and package details to decide whether it can hit that number. The carrier is adding 25% to 30% network capacity this year, mostly in the Northeast.

What this means for you: Pull your outbound weight distribution this week and find out what share sits between 1 and 20 pounds, because that percentage is the difference between telling a client 5.9% and telling them closer to 7%. Audit your top 50 lanes against the zone chart in January so the February reclassification happens on your terms, not in an invoice. If you pass parcel through at cost plus, the 9.1% on residential extended delivery area hits your rural brands hardest, so get ahead of it before they set a free-shipping threshold based on last year's math. And take the OnTrac meeting, because a carrier building a mechanism to quote you down while two others publish increases is worth an hour even if you never move a package.

On September 14, two men pulled into a warehouse in New Castle, Delaware, handed over driver's licenses, shipping documents, and a truck plate, all of which were fake, and drove off with a trailer carrying $680,000 in electronics. Police arrested Dushatdaman Parihar, 35, of Manteca, California, the next day near the abandoned trailer in Newark, on charges including felony theft over $100,000, first- and second-degree forgery, conspiracy, and use of a fictitious registration plate. Bond was set at $66,550.

Somebody knew which building, which load, and roughly when, because nobody drives in from California on the chance that a Delaware industrial park has something good inside, and that information came off a load board, a bill of lading, an email thread, or a TMS login.

We covered CargoNet's Q2 numbers in Edition 59, where fictitious pickups held roughly flat at 158 incidents while losses across all theft types more than doubled to $304.6 million, and the average theft carried a reported commodity value of $564,009. Electronics and enterprise hardware were named as priority targets, and CargoNet said groups are getting better at picking the right shipment rather than stealing more shipments.

At most buildings, a driver arrives, hands over paperwork, and someone at the desk reads it, meaning the only document in the transaction is checked against itself. Nobody wants to be the clerk who made a real driver wait for 40 minutes on hold.

What this means for you: Write down who on your floor can release freight to a driver, because in most buildings the honest answer is whoever happens to be at the desk when the truck shows up. Verification has to run on a phone number you look up yourself, not the one printed on the slip the driver handed you, and that policy costs you nothing to implement tomorrow. Photograph the plate, the tractor, the driver, and the license before anything moves, since the Delaware arrest came fast partly because there was something to look for. Then ask who outside your building knows which of your loads are worth stealing, because the answer usually includes a load board posting and three email threads. And call your broker about your cargo policy, because we flagged the strategic theft coverage gap in Edition 62 and release-to-an-imposter is the exact fact pattern sitting in it.

YARD
A beverage company took a yard automation pilot from 26 sites to more than 200. YardFlow says the pilot moved nearly 5% more freight with flat headcount across close to 2 million shipments, at 99.9% uptime, which is what led to its company-wide expansion. The system digitizes the driver journey from gate check-in through dock assignment to checkout, using electronic bills of lading, and then adds machine vision in the yard. Founder Jake Koppinger puts the freight gain at tens of millions in incremental profit at that scale. If your detention disputes and your BOL arguments both still run on paper, this is the cheapest automation category on your list, and it comes before anything autonomous.

REAL ESTATE
Rexford sold 22 Southern California buildings to EQT for $1.2 billion, and Link Logistics bought four more the next day. The Rexford portfolio spans 5.2 million square feet, with more than half of it infill near the LA and Long Beach ports, 96% leased to 36 tenants, and a weighted average of 2.7 years remaining on those leases. Link's deal added 697,276 square feet in Dallas-Fort Worth and Atlanta. A fund buying at roughly a 5.5% going-in yield has to grow it across its hold, and in industrial the only two levers are rent and occupancy. Go find out who owns your building and when your renewal notice is due.

ECOMMERCE
Only 14% of online shoppers want speed regardless of cost. Roadie, the UPS unit, surveyed more than 1,000 shoppers with Studio by Informa TechTarget and found that half ranked cheap or free delivery first, 44% want real-time tracking, and 31% would choose a reliable delivery window over the fastest option. Another 64% would stop ordering from a retailer after one to four bad delivery experiences. Vendor-adjacent survey; weight it accordingly, but it's useful the next time a brand wants you to shave an hour off a cutoff instead of fixing the small share of orders that actually go wrong.

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