The Physical Economy: A Field Guide › Chapter 2
A few orders of magnitude to carry with you. Treat these as ~right figures, not audited ones; sources include Armstrong & Associates' 2026 research and industry trade data.
| Thing | Rough size | Why it matters to us |
|---|---|---|
| U.S. trucking industry revenue | ~$900B+/yr | Trucks move roughly 70%+ of U.S. freight tonnage. Nearly everything in this guide ultimately touches a truck. |
| Global third-party logistics (3PL) market | ~$1.3T (2025), heading to ~$1.4T (2026) | The buildings and operators where the dock problem lives. U.S. 3PL revenues alone: ~$424B. |
| Fortune 500 companies using at least one 3PL | 94% (up from ~46% in 2001) | The structural shift reshaping who runs the physical economy (Chapter 8). |
| Registered U.S. motor carriers | Hundreds of thousands; the vast majority operate ten or fewer trucks | Extreme fragmentation on the supply side — why carrier-facing software must be zero-friction. |
| Freight brokerages in the U.S. | Tens of thousands; C.H. Robinson is the largest | Brokers are the market makers (Chapter 3), and heavy users of our booking network. |
| Detention's reach | ~39% of truckload stops; ~$15B+/yr industry cost (2023) | The quantifiable pain a facility platform removes — and documents. |
| Cargo theft (2025) | ~$725M reported, up ~60% YoY | Mostly identity fraud now, not crowbars. The tailwind behind identity verification at the dock. |
| Value-added 3PL packaging (kitting, assembly) | ~25% of a market growing from ~$30B to ~$43B by 2031 | 3PLs are becoming factories-lite — deepening the control gap for the brands they serve. |
One more number, because it frames everything: the software spend of this industry is a rounding error against its revenue. A facility doing $30M of throughput might spend a few thousand dollars a year on scheduling software — or nothing, running docks on a shared inbox. The market isn't saturated; it's barely addressed. The constraint has never been budget. It's that most software built for this world was built for the people who buy it (executives) rather than the people who use it (dock clerks, dispatchers, drivers), so it doesn't get adopted, so the industry concluded software doesn't work.
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