You knew, and that's the problem

Three retailers moved their delivery promise this week. The speed isn't the interesting part. The interesting part is that customers are reaching for their wallets to get it.

Walmart's 30-minutes-or-less service is now live in 38 U.S. markets, up from the 33 it launched with in May, with Nashville, Omaha, San Antonio, Wichita, and Winter Haven, Florida, added since. It costs $10 for Walmart+ members.

CFO John David Rainey told analysts that 37% of store-fulfilled deliveries in Q2 involved customers paying a fee to receive their orders faster, an all-time high. Gross merchandise value on deliveries of three hours or less grew 48% year over year. Store-fulfilled delivery sales rose by more than 40%. Stores now handle last-mile for 80% of Walmart's e-commerce orders and 100% of the fast ones. The physical footprint already exists, so speed gets layered onto real estate they're paying for regardless.

Home Depot went in the same direction from a different angle. Its express delivery is now nationwide, with delivery in 3 hours or less, using more than 2,000 stores as fulfillment hubs. The fee is $7 flat in most markets, $10 in Los Angeles, and there's no membership requirement, which is a deliberate shot at Walmart+ and Prime.

Then Amazon, which is expanding Prime Air to nearly 500 cities and towns by the end of the year, a sixfold jump from where it sits now. Metro Atlanta, Chicago, Cleveland, Boise, and Syracuse are on deck. Drone delivery costs $4.99 without Prime, $2.99 with Prime, and is free for orders over $50. Anything five pounds or under that fits in a large shoebox qualifies, which Amazon says covers more than 60% of its most frequently purchased items.

Drones make the headlines, so it's worth separating what's real from what's theater. Amazon has moved hundreds of thousands of packages by drone this year, which sounds like a lot until you put it next to what Walmart is doing out of stores. The drones are a long bet. The store network is what operates at scale today, and both Walmart and Home Depot got there by fulfilling orders from buildings they already had.

There's a second layer underneath all three. Rainey mentioned that 3,100 Walmart stores now receive freight that's been handled and palletized by automated systems, and Furner tied automation directly to the economics of the omnichannel model rather than to headcount. We wrote in Edition 59 that automation was moving from differentiator to table stakes. This is what that looks like when it shows up on an earnings call.

What this means for you: Your brands' customers are being trained on sub-three-hour delivery, and that expectation will land in your next RFP, whether or not it makes sense for the SKUs involved. You cannot out-node a 2,000-store network, and you shouldn't pretend otherwise. What you can compete on is cutoff time and node placement, because a 5 p.m. cutoff beats a 2 p.m. cutoff on the same building, and that's a fight you can actually win. When a brand asks for same-day, the useful question to ask back is: What percentage of their orders originate within a reasonable drive time of your facility? The answer usually makes the conversation much shorter and much more honest. And the paid-expedite tier is worth noting on its own: Walmart and Home Depot both proved that customers will pay a fee for speed, which means a premium fulfillment tier is a pricing conversation you can have with your clients rather than eating the cost.

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Two more broker liability cases moved forward this week, and one of them changes what "reasonable care" means in a way that should get anybody who tenders freight to pick up the phone with their attorney.

Start with Nevada. In Hardy vs. Singh, Judge Anne Traum denied summary judgment to both sides on August 11. The facts: AONE Brokerage booked a load of hay and tendered it to Lucky Transport. Lucky, which holds no brokerage authority, brokered it to GRK Transport. GRK's owner Bhupinder Singh skidded on a two-lane Nevada highway in July 2022 and hit a pickup head-on, killing one passenger and injuring the other.

AONE's defense was the one you'd expect: that the bad acts of Lucky and Singh cut the chain of causation. Traum wasn't buying it. She wrote that there is evidence AONE breached its duty of care by continuing to do business with Lucky even though it knew Lucky was subcontracting loads, and that contracting with Lucky could have been unreasonable because illegal double brokering puts more high-risk drivers on the road.

Sit with that. The judge isn't saying AONE was fooled by a double broker. She's saying AONE knew, kept tendering anyway, and that knowledge is itself evidence of negligence. Every broker and asset-light 3PL has a mental list of carriers who probably re-broker some percentage of what they take. That list just became discoverable.

The second case involves J.B. Hunt in the U.S. District Court for Arizona, where the company has a pending motion for summary judgment that, if granted, would end its role as a defendant. The plaintiffs are mostly family members of people killed or injured in an October 2023 crash, and they've sued J.B. Hunt, the carrier Borderlanders, and driver Shokhijakhon Bekmuradov. J.B. Hunt's position is straightforward: it acted as a broker; the Outsource Carrier Agreement puts hiring, supervising, training, and dispatching squarely on Borderlanders, and there's no basis for vicarious liability. The plaintiffs counter that J.B. Hunt ignored a documented history of safety alerts, crashes, and inspection violations, including violations for the inability to speak English.

There's a second allegation in that case worth flagging separately. The plaintiffs say J.B. Hunt held itself out to Lincare, the shipper, as the carrier, which believed its freight would move on a J.B. Hunt truck. If your company name appears on paperwork for freight you didn't physically touch, that ambiguity is now something a plaintiff's attorney will build an argument around.

All of this sits downstream of Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II, where the Supreme Court, unanimously, held that brokers don't get F4A preemption against the safety exception. Cases that used to die on a preemption motion now get litigated on the facts. C.H. Robinson is currently appealing a verdict north of $600 million in a post-Montgomery case, and the Fifth Circuit reversed the dismissal of Penske's brokerage arm from a fatal Texas crash suit.

One more thing landed in the same week. Chris Spear is out as CEO of the American Trucking Associations, effective immediately, nullifying an extension that would have run through 2029. These aren't connected events, but they bear on the same question. The ATA has been the loudest institutional voice calling on federal regulators for clear carrier-vetting standards, and it's now looking for a CEO as the case list grows.

What this means for you: The Nevada ruling is the actionable one. Knowing a carrier re-brokers and using them anyway is no longer a claims-department annoyance; it's a fact pattern a plaintiff will put in front of a jury. Go look at who is on your board, and be honest about which of them you suspect of subcontracting. Document vetting at the load level and not just at onboarding, because "we checked them in 2023" is not a defense when the question is what you knew on the day you tendered. If your brand name shows up on BOLs for freight you broker, get clarity on how you're representing yourself to shippers. And take a hard look at your contingent auto and contingent cargo limits, because anything set before Montgomery was priced for a world where preemption usually ended these cases early. That world is gone. Don't wait for federal vetting standards to bail you out either, since the organization pushing hardest for them is currently between chief executives.

Talks collapsed Friday night. The tariffs started Saturday morning.

Prime Minister Mark Carney announced he was suspending trade negotiations with the U.S. and recalling Canada's negotiators to Ottawa, citing last-minute changes he described as unfair, uneconomic, and damaging to the credibility of any deal. The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative told a different story, saying Canada introduced new demands and walked back earlier commitments after the U.S. had offered reductions on steel, aluminum, automobiles, and lumber.

Whoever you believe, the result is the same. The 50% Section 338 levies that Trump ordered last month, then delayed by three days, are now in effect. They account for roughly $20 billion in Canadian imports, including raw agricultural and natural materials, chemicals, textiles, consumer goods, wood products, paper, machinery, and tools. Carney says Canada will match dollar for dollar and add further measures in the coming days.

Scan that category list again with a warehouse in mind. Wood products and paper are on it. That's pallets and corrugated, and it's a cost that reaches you whether or not you touch a single cross-border shipment.

The bigger context is that this is happening inside an unresolved USMCA. The U.S. declined to extend the agreement last month, triggering an annual review process that could last up to a decade. Mexico has held formal bilateral talks with the U.S. both before and after that decision. Canada, obviously, has not. Pete Mento of Baker Tilly still expects the two countries to settle eventually, on the theory that the economies are too intertwined for extended escalation to appeal to either side, but he raised the question that actually matters for anyone planning capacity: whether the eventual settlement restores any confidence in the rules governing North American trade.

What this means for you: Anyone with cross-border clients is about to get calls, so decide before the phone rings what you can actually offer on bonded storage or FTZ handling and what you'd need a partner for. Watch your packaging costs independently of your freight costs, because paper and wood products are exposed here, and increases in corrugated can quietly show up in your cost per order. The retaliation piece matters more than people are treating it: clients shipping goods north get hit going both directions once Canada's matching measures land. And resist the temptation to plan Q4 around a resolution. The tariff might get lifted in six weeks. The uncertainty premium your clients are pricing into their inventory decisions will outlast it.

M&A
RoadOne acquired Higgins Transport Service, a Charleston, South Carolina, drayage operation, adding 15 drivers to its local fleet. Terms weren't disclosed, and owner Justin Higgins is staying on with his team. What makes this worth a look isn't the deal size; it's the pattern around it. RoadOne already runs a 384,000-square-foot facility in nearby Summerville and has another 280,000 square feet planned next door for 2027, so the drayage buy is filling in the transportation layer around the warehouse capacity it's already building. The Randolph, Massachusetts, company is privately held with more than 2,500 drivers across 100-plus port, rail, and truckload terminals. If you own a regional drayage or warehousing operation near a growing deep-water port, this is the buyer profile currently shopping.

CARRIER FAILURES
Three trucking companies filed Chapter 11 petitions in a single stretch this week: Anchor South Transport in Alabama, Rambo Transport in California, and Stoneman Trucking in Michigan, all of which are small businesses. Separately, the Teamsters said TP Freight Lines is shutting down after more than a century in business. Small carriers going under while rates firm up isn't a contradiction; it's the mechanism. Capacity leaves at the bottom first, and the survivors get pricing power on the way out. If you tender freight to small carriers, this is the season to check whether the ones on your list are still answering the phone.

OCEAN FREIGHT
The Panama Canal is cutting daily booking slots while pushing back its draft restrictions, a trade almost everyone is reading backward. Per the August 20 advisory, Neopanamax drops to 9 slots per day on September 3, and Panamax goes to 25, then 23, on September 15, compared with the usual 10 and 26, respectively. At the same time, the 48-foot draft restriction slid from August 26 to September 2, and the 47.5-foot restriction moved from September 3 all the way to October 1. Watershed rainfall has run 34% below the historical average since May. The canal chose fewer ships carrying more over more ships carrying less, which means your problem this fall is schedule reliability rather than capacity per sailing. MSC and CMA CGM already updated their Panama surcharges on August 18, so check what's landing on client invoices now and plan receiving labor for inbound shipments that arrive in clumps.

PORTS
The Army Corps of Engineers approved the Louisiana International Terminal, clearing the only new greenfield container port currently under development in the United States. The $1.8 billion Port of New Orleans project is targeting a 2028 opening at 180,000 to 280,000 TEUs, building to 2 million at full buildout over 25 years. MSC's terminal arm and Ports America are putting in more than $800 million, with $300 million in federal grants behind it. Two berths, 55 feet of water, and access to all six Class I railroads through the New Orleans Public Belt. Existing New Orleans terminals can't accommodate ships over 16,000 TEU because of the Crescent City Connection bridge, so locating downriver removes a constraint that's capped the gateway for decades. Gulf Coast volume ran about 5 million TEUs last year across Houston, Mobile, New Orleans, and Tampa. If you've been watching for the next warehouse market to be built from scratch, this is a two-year head start.

WAREHOUSE TECH
Dexterity's Mech robot is now loading trailers, not just unloading them, which is the harder half of the job and the reason this one is worth reading. Unloading is a sequencing problem. Loading requires deciding where each package goes while accounting for weight, shape, damage, and orientation, all inside a trailer that looks different every time. Co-founder Robert Sun described it as playing Tetris and said the company went after loading specifically after FedEx approached it about unloading. The design keeps people in the loop rather than replacing them: employees are trained as robot pilots who monitor via a tablet and step in when a box arrives half-open or a label is unreadable. Beckhoff's Doug Schuchart framed the labor case in terms that most operators will recognize: keeping your general workforce steady throughout the year rather than riding the seasonal swing. Nobody's replacing a lumper crew this quarter, but dock automation moved from concept to bid-able faster than most people expected.

WAREHOUSING
Amazon is prepping a million-square-foot distribution center in Norwich, Connecticut, to store, pick, pack, and ship to downstream sortation and local delivery centers. That's the upstream half of the same speed strategy driving the drone and store-fulfillment news above. Southeastern Connecticut has never been a fulfillment hub, so if you operate anywhere in that labor shed, price your warehouse wages against what Amazon posts when hiring opens rather than against what your regional competitors pay today. Those numbers reset a market faster than anything else on this list.

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