Six Tons Lighter, Same Rate

Two tickets, same truck, same driver, same pit, same 14 miles to the same job.

The August ticket reads 24.1 tons net. At a $4.25 per ton haul rate, that trip grossed $102. The April ticket reads 18.1 tons, because the county posted the road on March 15 and the posting took six tons off the payload. Same trip, $77.

Nothing else about the trip shrank. Same 50 minutes loaded and empty, same driver's wage, nearly the same fuel, same wear on the same tires. Call the trip's operating cost $65 either way. In August the load carries a $37 margin. In April it carries $12. Your haul rate took a two-thirds margin cut for eight weeks, by law, on schedule, and no document anywhere calls it a price change.

A per-ton rate is a per-trip cost wearing a payload

Every per-ton haul rate was born as division. Somebody, maybe years ago, took what a truck costs to run for an hour, figured the round trip, and divided by what the truck legally carries. The rate sheet kept the answer, $4.25, and quietly threw away the assumption, 24 tons.

That assumption is false every spring. When the frost comes out of the ground, counties and townships across the northern states post their roads, usually mid-March through May, and the legal load drops by a quarter to nearly half depending on the road and the axles under you. The work doesn't pause for it. The water main job still starts the first week of April. Milk doesn't wait for the thaw either: on routes no hauler exemption covers, the tank runs light for eight weeks while the per-hundredweight rate stays exactly where January set it, so the same farm pickup takes more trips for the same pay. Spring is the season you run the most trips for the least money, and the per-ton rate is the reason.

Put a season's shape on the arithmetic. One truck, nine trips a day, five days a week, eight weeks of postings: 360 trips. Call it $25 of lost revenue per trip against the same trip cost: $9,000 per truck, per spring. Run six trucks and you've donated a new pickup to the thaw. Nobody approved that. It isn't in any contract. It's just what division does when the denominator changes and the rate doesn't.

The five-dollar clause and the twenty-five-dollar silence

The industry wrote a standard clause for its small per-trip risk and never wrote one for its big seasonal one. Take that claim into your next renewal and argue with it.

Diesel moves, so haul contracts grew fuel surcharges. Fine. But do the per-trip math on both risks. A 25 percent swing in diesel moves that 14-mile round trip by five or six dollars. A road posting moves it by twenty-five. One of those risks has an index, a schedule, and a line on the invoice. The other one has a shrug and a sentence: that's just spring.

The objections are the usual ones, and they're half right. Your customer won't sign a posted-road surcharge he's never seen before. The hauler across the county won't charge one, so you'll lose the April work to him. Both can be true, and neither means you should price the season by accident. There are quieter instruments than a surcharge. Haul by the trip instead of the ton inside the posted window, which is how you price any job where the load size is out of your hands. Put a date-ranged spring rate in the contract, a dollar and a half a ton across the posted weeks, sized off your own tickets so it actually covers the gap. Or eat the season on purpose: spread the $9,000 across the annual rate, write the assumption down, and let the guy across the county be the one donating his spring unknowingly. A GC doesn't bid winter concrete at summer prices. On a lot of jobs, the hauler is the only company on site pricing March like July.

flowchart TD
  A["August ticket: 24.1 tons at $4.25 = $102 trip"] --> C["Trip cost $65: margin $37"]
  B["April ticket, posted road: 18.1 tons = $77 trip"] --> D["Trip cost $65: margin $12"]
  C --> E{"Who priced the posted season?"}
  D --> E
  E -- "nobody" --> F["360 spring trips eat the gap"]
  E -- "the contract" --> G["Trip rate or dated spring rate"]

The evidence never left your building

What makes this leak unusual is that the proof is already filed. A take-or-pay shortfall or an unbilled standby charge leaves no paper behind; this one leaves paper twice a day. Every scale ticket from every posted week has the net weight on it, in ink, next to the date. Your own books hold a complete record of what spring does to your payloads, route by route, year after year. Nobody reads it that way, because nobody reads a season off a tray of carbons, and the rate conversation happens in December off last year's rate sheet instead of last April's tickets.

So run the evidence once. Pull the book for one posted route, average the nets from mid-March through mid-May, then average July's. Multiply the gap by your rate and by last spring's trip count. That number is what the posting charged you last year, and it's the number to carry into the winter quote meeting, because a renewal is where this gets fixed and renewals are being written right now.

Doing that with a calculator is an evening per route, which is why it never happens twice. The arithmetic only gets cheap once the tickets stop living on paper alone, and that part is Termco's job. Each ticket gets digitized as your drivers already write it, carbon books and all, so last spring's nets sit in a column you can average instead of a tray you'd have to key first. A dated spring rate lives in reference data with a start and an end, billing rules apply it when the calendar says so, and a load billed at the summer rate inside the posted window gets flagged before the invoice goes out. Nothing changes in the cab or at the scale. If you want to see what your own paper says about last spring, send 10-20 sample tickets to hi@termco.ai and findings come back within 48 hours.

The two tickets that opened this piece agree with each other completely. The scale told the truth in August and it told the truth in April. Of everything in the file, the only document that never noticed spring was the rate sheet, and it's the one that decides what you get paid.