U.S. merchant-wholesaler sales fell 3.0% from May to a seasonally adjusted $794.1 billion in June, according to the Census Bureau's latest Monthly Wholesale Trade report. Sales were still 14.1% above June 2025, while wholesale inventories edged up 0.2% from May to $944.7 billion and were 4.2% higher than a year earlier. Census cautioned that the monthly inventory change was not statistically different from zero.
The monthly decline was not uniform across the wholesale floor. Nondurable-goods sales fell 5.1%, heavily influenced by a 19.4% drop in petroleum sales, while durable-goods sales decreased 0.8%. Groceries, apparel, farm products, chemicals, furniture, lumber, and miscellaneous durable goods each posted monthly sales gains, which makes the aggregate decline a mixed demand signal rather than evidence that every freight segment weakened together.
International goods flows also cooled in June. The Bureau of Economic Analysis and Census Bureau reported that goods imports declined $7.9 billion from May and goods exports declined $4.0 billion. On a chained-dollar basis, real goods imports fell 2.6% and real goods exports fell 0.9%, a volume-oriented signal that supports a softer month for some port, drayage, transload, and inland distribution activity without translating directly into truckload counts.
The wholesale inventories-to-sales ratio was 1.19 in June, below 1.30 a year earlier. That lower ratio argues against treating the inventory total as a simple nationwide glut, even though inventories were higher in dollars and sales lost momentum from May. Commodity prices, product mix, seasonal adjustment, and where inventory sits in the network can all separate a national dollar series from the loads available to a particular carrier.
Carriers should compare the public signal with their own booked loads, tender acceptance, customer order cadence, dock appointments, trailer turns, and empty repositioning by lane. A fleet seeing weaker inbound volumes but stable outbound orders may need a different capacity response than one serving petroleum, computers, machinery, or another category that moved sharply in the June data. The practical decision is to resize commitments from customer and lane evidence, not from one national percentage alone.