The peculiarity of trends is that they seem to show up quickly but no one knows if they’re gonna stick around long enough to become practice. It's like the industry is rushing ideas and applications to market before any real testing or consideration. Here are some topics and policies that may come to life in the coming years.

In July, we wrote about claims that Walmart was pressuring its carriers, who also haul for Amazon, to cease and desist if they want to retain Walmart business. In fairness, we want to point out that Walmart has denied pressuring any of its truckers. The retailer told TheStreet.com that the report about the truckers was false, noting it’s “illegal for us to tell them who they can do business with,” a spokesperson said. The warning to truckers, true or not, comes at a time when Walmart is picking up its fight with Amazon, which has long been the dominant e-Commerce leader in the U.S. Just last week, the Wall Street Journal reported Walmart has started telling technology partners not to run applications for the retailer on Amazon Web Services (AWS). According to the paper, tech executives said that if they want to continue to keep Walmart’s business, they have to use other cloud-computing services like Microsoft’s Azure cloud service. Walmart maintains most of its data internally, but a spokesman confirmed to the Wall Street Journal that there are cases where some of the cloud apps it uses run on AWS. The spokesman wouldn’t disclose the apps, but did confirm it has urged vendors to use other cloud-computing business solutions in those cases. “It shouldn’t be a big surprise that there are cases in which we’d prefer our most sensitive data isn’t sitting on a competitor’s platform,” the spokesman told the Wall Street Journal. He noted it’s in a small number of cases.

When shipping hazardous materials of any type company representatives must have a strong understanding of the products they are attempting to ship and the federal requirements that govern the domestic and international transportation of hazardous material. The DOT defines a hazardous material as any item or chemical which, when being transported or moved in commerce, is a risk to public safety or the environment, and is regulated as such under its Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration regulations as outlined in 49 CFR 100-199.  Regulations for the transport of hazardous materials are comprehensive and somewhat complex.  Maintaining a strong understanding of these regulations and potential pitfalls of hazmat transportation is critical to the safe and successful handling and delivery of your product and protection of your brand.  There is an old saying "The only bad press is your obituary".  This may not apply in the transportation of your products.  Front page news of a hazmat breach while in transit could very well be the obituary for your brand.  Just ask Exxon about a little oil spill in Alaska. 

When was the last time you checked out the efficiency of your supply chain?  According to a report published by the American Trucking Association, freight volumes in the transportation market are expected to continuously grow over the next decade.  Consequently, equipment availability is sure to decline.

Walmart is on the offensive. It really has little choice but to go at Amazon full throttle with an in your face attitude. It's risky but the alternative is to be satisfied with a distant second place to Amazon in the online marketplace - a marketplace wherein lies most of the future growth for retailers.

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. is telling its for-hire motor carriers that if they also haul goods for Amazon.com Inc., they will have to stop doing so in return for keeping Walmart business, a leading transport and logistics consultant said 2 weeks ago.   According to Deutsche Bank's freight and logistics analyst Amit Mehrotra , these developments, "are likely to have significant implications for U.S. transportation companies, in our view, as Amazon and Walmart remain two of the largest users of truckload capacity.

In revising the North American Free Trade Agreement, the Trump administration will seek tax equality and the ability to reimpose tariffs if a flood of imports from Canada and Mexico causes "a threat of serious injury" to U.S. industry. According to an administration draft proposal being circulated in Congress by the U.S. trade representative’s office, the U.S. would keep some of NAFTA’s most controversial provisions, including an arbitration panel that lets investors in the three nations circumvent local courts. The administration also will seek to eliminate a requirement in the trade deal that anti-dumping and anti-subsidy disputes be settled via a special dispute panel. Some U.S. industries including lumber have complained that the current agreement protocol is ineffective in stopping unfair subsidies. Additionally, the U.S. wouldn’t use the NAFTA negotiations to deal with foreign currency policies or to hit numerical targets for bilateral trade deficits, as some trade industry watchers have been urging.

In an effort to help close a $3 billion budget deficit, Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf has asked the state legislature to extend the state’s 6% sales and use tax to commercial storage services, drawing strong criticism from business groups, especially warehouse owners.  

Watch out Walmart, Target, Blue Apron, Grub Hub and any grocery chain entering the food delivery business.  The great white shark of delivery services will soon be in the water.  Amazon.com's $13.7 billion purchase of Whole Foods instantly makes it a major player in the U.S. grocery industry and that leaves a lot for shoppers, retailers and other companies involved in the industry to take notice. This deal marks the beginning of an era where the e-commerce giant pushes to enter the brick-and-mortar world, marking its next grocery-related milestone after it announced plans to launch Amazon Go, a checkout-free grocery store. 

A blockchain facilitates secure online transactions and is a decentralized and distributed digital ledger that records transactions across many computers in such a way that the registered transactions cannot be altered retroactively. So how can this technology benefit your supply chain?