Snackbar is chillin'....at Shaffer

From an office weanie's perspective - there are some drivers who leave their truck running when it's 60 degrees outside while they're in the truck stop "lounge" pontificating about how (insert NFL team that's sucking) should hire him as head coach as he played varsity in high school and this knows more about football than/ telling Gibs how to catch the killer and uncover the spy.

There are some drivers who ignore the fuel solution not because of efficiency or efficacy but because "they like Loves better than Kwik Trip". They are on different sides of the highway, but kwik trip is 40 cents a gallon less. The Pilot in Oak Creek is 20 cents a gallon less than the pilot in Franksville, 10 miles away.

And even if the difference is only 10 cents a gallon, on average across the fleet, that's not pennies. Figuring 400 miles a day, at 8 mph a truck burns 50 gallons a fuel a day. On a 10,000 truck fleet, that's $50,000 a day, or over $17 million a year, or roughly increasing net profits by at least 5%. On a 100 truck or smaller operation, it doesn't make sense (or at least much cents (sorry)). Once you get over 500 a company would be foolish not to.

Just a little devil's advocate.

 

Companies as large as Crete don’t pay pump price. They negotiate the price of fuel and pre purchase in quantities in the hundreds of thousands to millions of gallons in a single transaction.

 

When things went south here I was really not looking forward to job hunting again. I only have 18 months left before I retire but I truly hate being taken advantage of. But I was pleasantly surprised when I was contacted by the Operations Manager when he got my job reference letter. He was willing to address a lot of my issues and I have decided to stay put for now. Its a gamble, but one worth taking.

 

Yes, that's true, the price on the sign means nothing. I was talking about what the carrier is paying. It's not just a difference between brands, but also between locations - if we fuel x gallons at any one location, we get a .10/gallon rebate. If we fuel 110% of x, we get an .11/gallon rebate. Thus it makes sense for us to send all of our trucks to one location over the other one down the street. There are also tax differences (ifta plus local taxes) - there is someplace in KY (I think) where there are two pilots on opposite sides of the interstate. The interstate is the dividing line between counties so there is a significant difference between final price at the two locations.

I wasn't exaggerating the savings my company gets from using a fuel optimization program.

 

Bud if you’re truly that close to retirement, just smile and count the months…heck at this stage of life time flies…

 

I don’t doubt some drivers abuse the fuel solutions but that wouldn’t be hard to address. One problem with only allowing the cheapest option is that every other mega will be using the same place at the same time. What’s the cost of 5000 trucks tied up for an extra 30 minutes a day?

 

I found a company where I’m finally happy at. Doesn’t matter that I have to commute almost 100 miles one way, not every day mind you. I’ll take the 200 mile commute to work at a place where I’m happy, instead of being somewhere where I’d be miserable.

 

Regardless of how you entice/coerce drivers to follow the fuel solution, there will be a significant number who will decide "I'm a GAM, I know best". At a certain point it's easier to cut the Gordian knot than it is to untie it.

A few years ago I had "Brad" come thru my truck. "Brad" had hired on, gone thru training, and gone out on his own. While on home time, Brad broke his arm. It was 8 months before Brad was medically cleared to return to work. Company policy is that if you've been off for more than 60 days you have to take a check ride before returning to work. Some would call that silly, others asinine, but Brad (like many, many, many others) failed the check ride. Then he failed the second chance check ride. Brad was offered a choice, drop into the inexperienced class or be termed for cause. Brad chose to re-enter the training cycle and landed in my truck. Brad thought the training would be pro forma, and copped an attitude when it wasn't. Two days in, Brad had an epiphany. As he put it in the official evaluation (copied and pasted) "Dude was sitting there playing candy crush and calling out things I didn't see without looking up". At which point Brad started paying attention and learned a whole bunch. Despite that Brad didn't take to heart our pay and bonus structure. Brad fueled where he found it convenient. It took a concerted effort between Brad's DM and I to convince Brad that following the fuel solution was in his best interests, to the tune of $2,500 a year. There have been many studies that show that if a school/day care charges money for late pick ups, behavior doesn't change. Make the parents apologize, and late pick ups drop off precipitously. Applied to our environment, making drivers call in to fuel non compliant results in a precipitous drop off in non compliant fuelings.

I know the pain of sitting in a packed Pilot when I know 50 miles down the road there is a Pilot with open pumps and pull through parking. It took 6 months and me jumping the chain of command to get the KT next to "our" plant put into the network and over a year for us to remove a dangerous fuel stop from the optimizer (the KT was set up fine, it was all the illegal parking blocking the driveways that was the issue). I also know that I negate the cost savings when I do the '50 gallons for a shower credit and a compliant fueling'. From my perspective, the whole thing is beyond stupid.

When you start leveling up and looking at the data from an OC level, the perspective changes. Even more when you look at Division numbers, and when you look at Enterprise data your mind will melt. Few drivers max out their 11. It was a battle royal to get Yard Move approved - the primary reason wasn't to get more drive time, but rather to avoid "supporting document violations". Even fewer run more than 12 of their 14. Spending another 15-30 minutes fueling has a minimal impact on the total number of miles run in a day. It does make the average day longer, but overall revenue per truck per day stays the same while cost per truck per day drops. I think the fuel optimizer programs are dumb - I'd prefer to be given a list of every T/S along my route that has a cost per gallon within .05 cents and let me chose which one makes more sense from an efficiency standpoint. Incidentally, so would the guy who runs our fuel optimization program. The problem is programing and tracking it. What seems like a simple thing from the surface becomes a Herculian task in a hurry. It's easier just to lock down fueling.

It's not the "BEST WAY", but it's the most effective way.

 

Only because drivers are dumb enough to do it for free.

If you required the office drones to waste half an hour a day, off duty unpaid, you wouldn't have anybody left in the office and wouldn't have to wait long to hear from your favorite people about it (the government).

 

You're comparing apples to kumquats. If the office drones were only paid for the time they were on the phone then they would make a 5 minute phone call take two hours.

The only way to make waiting for a fuel pump costly for the carrier is to force carriers to pay for line 4 time, or total time from coming on duty at the start of shift to the moment they go off duty. Every time I've seen this happen it has resulted in a net loss of pay to the driver.