Adam N. Satterfield
Senior Vice President - Finance, Chief Financial Officer and Assistant Secretary at Old Dominion Freight Line
Sure. I'll test my memory, I guess, and see if I can remember all of those, but. So, for September, looking at on a year-over-year basis our tonnage was down 5.4% and then shipments, those were, let's see here, shipments per day were down 6.8%. So, we had a little bit of an increase in weight per shipment for the month that was up about 1.5% overall. And so, if you, remember, we've talked before about the weight per shipment trend last year, the third quarter was our low watermark, if you will, where we were at a total of 1,538 pounds. So, we did start seeing a sequential increase from the third quarter to the fourth quarter of last year. So that should somewhat normalize as we transition. Looking at things on a sequential basis for the tonnage, we did have in September about a 0.4% increase versus August, the 10-year average is at 3.9% increase.
So similar, I think what we saw in the third quarter is similar to the second quarter. We did underperform for the total quarter, the average sequential trends in 2Q and we did again, this the third straight quarter of under-performance, if you will, but we started out with a decrease in July, which is pretty typical, we were down 4%. The 10-year average is down 3% and then we dropped a little bit further in August, which is normally about flattish, and then we just didn't see the sizable increase that we typically do in September.
We'll say that so far and obviously there's still days to be finished for October, but it looks like we are trending pretty much right in line with normal seasonality at this point, which I think is an encouraging trend, certainly a lot of work left to do as we go through the fourth quarter. Typically, we would see an increase in November, and then it drops off in December. Normally, overall, you've got a decrease in average for the fourth quarter versus the third. Last year, we did have an increase, which makes the comps quite a bit tougher in the fourth quarter, and we anticipated that really as going into the beginning of this year, really.
So, I think it's just one of those things, like we said in our prepared remarks, that certainly feels like demand for us, the feedback that we're getting from our customers has been positive. We're seeing good trends with our national account reporting, and not losing customers. So, things are all trending favorably in that regard. It's just a matter of the demand, we feel like it's not out there for our customers' products, if you will, just not picking up as much freight from those same customers that we may be making stops every day at their locations.
So, just continuing to kind of work through these challenges, if you will, we certainly made adjustments all year, I think when you look at the operating ratio performance in general and what our service metrics are, we've been making adjustments to this lower than anticipated volume environment that we've been in, but we typically, when we've been in a down cycle we've been in a negative GDP environment this year, a lot of times you'll see 3 to 5 quarters where we kind of underperformed our 10-year average, and I always like to remind everyone that our 10-year average includes doubling the market share, but this, like I said was the third quarter where we underperformed.
We're going into the winter. That's always a little bit seasonally slower anyways, and so We feel like based on what we've been able to do so far this year producing over $900 million of revenue growth, have good solid operating ratio improvement. We'll get through this. And then certainly have been, perhaps we start seeing some buildup once we get into the spring and I'm talking on a sequential basis, start seeing that build out back in the business, once we get into the spring. maybe centers, obviously lots going on with the economy, but that's some of the baseline for what we're thinking right now.