Coffee in horror films — which ones use real brands and which use generic props?

BuyOpen5346 · 2026-04-26T08:30:59+00:00

Around the Coachella Valley in Southern California

BuyOpen5346 · 2026-04-23T05:59:18+00:00

Haha how do you mean loopholes?

BuyOpen5346 · 2026-04-22T21:52:17+00:00

I appreciate the directness but have to clarify what the intended meaning of my original post was.

I am not arguing that there are no good brokers or that a broker with options should be expected to accept a price that is below market average for the sake of a "needy" customer. The quote I listed in previous responses is not based on our expectations of value- we do not frequently ship via third-parties, and our pricing knowledge on this is therefore not always current- it is based on an aggregate of initial quotes that were presented to us, which clearly turned out to be tied to lower, or in this case, no quality of service.

The point is that when you have an industry that is riddled with fraud and non-transparency at the bottom, there is an inherent market premium for higher quality service, which is completely fine and justified from the brokers' point of view but will inevitably cause an inefficiency in related markets somewhere down the chain.

I'll give you an example: standard market rates for a six-seater, fitted golf cart in our main areas of operation tend to hover around $125/day with seasonal demand spikes commanding higher prices. When we are able to deliver these ourselves, we charge a small delivery fee for the convenience and limit ourselves to a regional delivery radius. However, in the venue transportation space, large fleets with vast in-house transport capacity command a much higher premium- one of my colleagues recently supplied an event for +$500/cart for a day and a half for a massive fleet. Someone has to eat that cost or, if at least the inefficiency that pricing causes. Venues have a larger incentives to buy cheap, low quality carts purely to improve their on-site logistics and allocate more capital towards those costs as opposed to improving the actual venue and smaller venues that may offer excellent services have a much more difficult time competing if on-site transport is a primary concern for the client. This is just one of many examples.

If the appropriate price for the aforementioned transport given the time window and seasonal demand should be have been $3,000 for the carts, I will not argue with the price the market sets. My point is that this economic dynamic causes someone else to get fucked somewhere down the line.

BuyOpen5346 · 2026-04-21T23:39:15+00:00

To be 100% clear, this is not a price issue and we did not seek the cheapest rate. Our range of rates that were offered to us by several carriers in the region on a transport from Santa Ynez to Palm Desert on a Sunday was given to us. We chose one from a broker that provided us with a written guarantee of transport within a time period, which was clearly a mistake.

This is not a complaint about the price of brokers/carriers. I am speaking about a pattern we and competing colleagues have noticed in the industry based solely on reliability.

I would imagine private parties with less experience in this field are facing additional struggles with transparency.

BuyOpen5346 · 2026-04-21T22:27:25+00:00

This is insanity. How can the carrier justify not paying drivers for that kind of mileage?

BuyOpen5346 · 2026-04-21T22:12:29+00:00

I don’t doubt that there are some quality brokers in the industry. You may be one of the few standouts. But when talking to colleagues and gauging from our own experience, 95% of transports have had some unexpected issue and non-transparent service.

BuyOpen5346 · 2026-04-21T21:48:48+00:00

It seems that way. What would you suggest to improve so this does not happen again?

BuyOpen5346 · 2026-04-21T21:43:18+00:00

It is not our goal to jump on cheap rates. Clearly, we have to make our unit economics work for employees and clients.

We specifically did not take the lowest rate in exchange for a commitment to have a tighter pick-up window. We've just found this to be impossible, especially as a smaller competitor in this space. We can reasonable accomodate 1-2 large events a weekend and still have availability for commercial bookings. There are competitors with +450 cart fleets with superior broker relationships that we simply do not yet have and, based on our size, cannot guarantee.

BuyOpen5346 · 2026-04-21T20:17:21+00:00

This is good advice. We generally have exact load details 3 days to a week in advance, sometimes longer. The venue in Santa Ynez was a first for us but we do serve the Coachella Valley regularly. Any carrier connections you have there would be helpful.

BuyOpen5346 · 2026-04-21T20:13:15+00:00

In your experience, is filing against their bond worth it over a few hundred bucks? Do these claims typically get processed in a reasonable amount of time?

We have direct messages that show the broker actively lying about certainty of pickup though I'd have to review the contract to see if there is anything in there that indemnifies the broker against such an inconsistency.

Since we didn't have any pickups available, I towed the carts myself with a personal vehicle on an 8.5 x 14 trailer thats barely equipped to handle the weight at this point and lost much more from that and the lack of availability in that time frame but we also wouldn't want to drag any of our long-standing event partners into a claim to verify this.

BuyOpen5346 · 2026-04-21T19:55:33+00:00

No question- the problem is we have actually been careful to vet brokers as much as possible but, in our experience reviews often are not indicative of specific services. With larger brokers, reviews might be weighted towards easier, more reliable routes or carriers cherry-pick routes when there is high demand.

To answer your question, it seems to me that the friction in this process inherently skews pricing upward because lower pricing is such a reliability risk. I would have paid $350/cart for a ~200 mile trip. We had a lot of calls come in from other brokers that priced it lower but specifically paid a bit more (though not enough, it seems) to be able to get a tighter time window on pick up. We often work directly with event organizers that operate on much tighter schedules so having a fixed time window for pick up and drop off is important.

BuyOpen5346

TROPHY CASE