Wal-Mart tells truckers it may drop them if they haul for Amazon

Walmart's logistics arm, which encompasses both the retailer's private fleet and transportation outsourced to for-hire carriers, has started telling carriers it may opt against doing business with them if they also do business with Amazon, according to a transportation analyst familiar with the messaging.

Satish Jindel, head of SJ Consulting out of Pittsburgh, says he has heard from several carrier executives that Walmart relayed such a message. Walmart is not explicitly telling its contracted carriers not to do business with Amazon, Jindel says. Rather, the company is saying that if a carrier is doing business with Amazon, then Walmart may choose not to do business with them.

The carriers Jindel refers to are not large mega fleets. Instead, they are carriers in the 100-to-300-truck range.

Though Walmart and Amazon have entered a battle for online retail dollars, Walmart's message to carriers may be more pragmatic than antagonistic. Jindel says one of Walmart's chief concerns is freight cyclicality and securing trucking capacity during busy seasons. "The genuine concern is that when [Walmart] needs 30 trucks from a company, that they get those 30 trucks instead of losing out because they are working for Amazon," he says. The company is "protecting its ability to get capacity when they need it."

The practice is not unique to Walmart's trucking operations, however. The company has told other suppliers that working with Amazon, particularly leveraging Amazon's cloud storage business, could be an invitation to be dropped. The cloud-storage concerns center on Walmart's proprietary data passing through or being stored on a competitor's servers. "I don't want that information in the hands of my competitors," says Jindel.

For carriers in the middle of this, it is a reminder of how customer concentration and competitive politics among large shippers can shape who you can haul for. Diversifying your customer base remains one of the best protections against being squeezed by any single account's demands.