The load we have on now and the one Turtle describes above is what I consider to be classic expedited freight. In our case, an urgent need developed for an aircraft part in one state and the part was in another state. We received the call and got quickly rolling. On any other day, the delivery would be straight-through, dock-to-dock; but this is Thanksgiving and there is no one available to receive delivery, so we'll deliver tomorrow morning.
At the pick-up, the shipper was literally standing on the dock with the freight, waiting for us to arrive. He was eager to load the truck, not so much because the freight was urgently needed at the other end, but because his holiday weekend would begin when the freight was on our truck and signed over to us.
We have seen that many times in expediting. For some loads, it's not so much about when the shipment will arrive as it is about when the shipment gets "shipped" from the shipper's point of view. It may be because the guy gets to go home once the shipment is on the truck. More often, it is because the shipper gets to bill out or otherwise check off an event of major importance once the shipper's bill of lading is signed and the motor carrier takes responsibility for the freight. In those cases, the time-critical part is more about the shipper's schedule and needs than the consignee's.
One thing we learned when we moved from FedEx Custom Critical to Landstar Express America was that a good amount of the "emergency" freight we haul is not emergency freight at all. At FCC, the emergencies are often not real but contrived. They are important because the consequences of failure are significant to the driver, but they are also meaningless to the customer.
The FCC dispatch system computes pick-up and delivery times based on the distance to be traveled and an assumed rate of driving speed; and if the driver does not arrive for the pick ups and deliveries at those times, he or she is charged with a service failure; even if the delivery is set for 2 a.m. but the place does not open until 8 a.m.
We once picked up a Landstar load of critical-shipment freight and asked the shipper when he wanted it delivered by. He said, in a spring month, that if we got it there sometime before September, that would be fine. Had we been with FCC, the "emergency" delivery time would have been 1.5 days later. That freight went on our truck not because it was time-definite, but because it was exclusive-use; that is, they wanted it loaded and unloaded one time and not mixed in with other shipments.
It is difficult to come up with a single definition of expedited freight because the characteristics of each shipment vary so much.
It might be emergency freight because the shipper absolutely has to have it on the truck by a certain day and time and delays in production left them with no other shipping options than to put it in an expediter truck. Or it might be an emergency not because the product would spoil if not quickly shipped, and not because the freight could not be mixed in with other freight, but because a vital supplier relationship hangs in the balance.
An example is the few boxes of T-shirts we once ran straight through from Los Angeles to a Walmart distribution center in the Midwest. To keep its Walmart account in good shape, it was absolutely essential for this shipper to keep its delivery commitments to Walmart. The money spent paid to ship these T-shirts greatly exceeded their value, but it was not about the T-shirts, it was about the value of the account.
Exclusive use is sometimes cited as a characteristic of expedited freight. Sometimes the load is exclusive not because it is something special about the freight itself, but because the schedule requires dock-to-dock, straight through delivery. While no one would have a problem loading this cargo with other shipments, as a practical matter there is not time to do so; so, by default, the shipment becomes "exclusive use."
There are other times when the shipper truly needs the truck to be fully dedicated to the shipment. That is often the case with loads that require security, like when a driver must be in attendance of the load at all times the load is on the truck. As drivers who do that kind of work well know, many such loads are anything but straight-through and time-definite. These teams spend many hours and sometimes even days babysitting the cargo they have on board.
It has sometimes been suggested that a true expedited shipment is one that is scheduled on short notice. But carriers that are considered expedited carriers have and seek to develop contracts for a number of shipments that are regularly scheduled well in advance. These shipments are dispatched as expedited shipments to the drivers who haul them, but in some cases they are as regular as the sunrise.
As I said, the characteristics of "expedited" shipments vary from load to load. Is it a real emergency or one contrived by the dispatch system? Does the time-definite need exist on one end of the shipment only or by people on both ends? If there is nothing time-definite at all, is it really "expedited" freight? Is it exclusive-use because there is not time to put other loads on the truck, or because the shipper does not want the freight handled more than once on each end, or because security protocols demand that nothing else be placed on the truck?
Defining "expediter" is further complicated by the fact that many drivers who consider themselves to be expediters do only certain kinds of work. Some are willing to babysit freight while others will go nowhere near the stuff that requires that kind of attention. Some are willing to drive as long as they legally can and go wherever the freight takes them. Others who consider themselves expediters make regular runs from the airport to area deliveries and are home every night.
What is an "expediter?" It is difficult to say. It is safe to day, I think, that whatever expediting is today, it is not as special and distinctive as it was years ago when expediting services were truly unique and provided by only a few carriers. Consequently, much of the value-added premium that used to be built into expedited freight rates has disappeared.
In the early days, pay phones, pagers and conscientious human effort were used to keep shippers informed of the freight location and status, and the transportation infrastructure did not exist to move freight quickly as expediters then did. That changed as technology advanced.
Now freight of many kinds is tracked with electronic scanners and bar codes. For very little money, a shipper can place trackers on the freight and the freight itself will provide location information if so desired. Be it an overnight envelope via FedEx or an Amazon shipment via UPS or a regularly scheduled load of auto parts coming from Mexico, shipment tracking has become the norm. So much so that if a carrier of any kind could not tell the customer where the shipment is, or at least where and when it was when last handled, the customer would be astounded.
As the article linked to above shows, LTL carriers evolved to meet many of the fast-freight needs of customers of all kinds, giving rise to the kind of "expedited" services now routinely provided by LTL companies that can move a shipment overnight and track it every step of the way.
Instead of trying to define an expediter by the kind of freight one hauls, it might be better to describe the mental and emotional state of the truck driver in question.
An expediter, at least one of the EO variety, is one who is willing to haul freight that may or may not be associated with a true emergency, may or may not be urgent, may or may not be high-value, may or may not be the only thing on the truck, may or may not require babysitting, and may or may not be regularly scheduled. So, whatever it is that they do, EO expediters call it expediting for one reason or another, and they seem to love it.
