Freight math: why backhauling matters more than you think

A 36-tote truckload from our yard to Pittsburgh, PA is roughly 350 highway miles. At our cost-per-mile, that's about $4.10/mi or $1,400 round-trip. If the truck comes home empty, that's the price you pay.

But our dispatcher's whole job is to make sure no truck comes home empty. If we've got a buy-back pickup in Pittsburgh the same day — say, 18 totes from a brewery — the round-trip cost gets split across both loads. Suddenly that Pittsburgh-bound truck quote drops from $1,400 to about $820.

This is why our quotes vary so much. Same load, same distance, totally different freight depending on what's already in the routing system. A few practical implications:

• Flexibility on date saves money. If you can wait a week, we'll quote you against the next existing route. Same-day pickup costs more.
• Bigger drop = better rate. A full truckload to a single location prices best. Splits cost more in lift time.
• Selling and buying at the same time. If you're getting rid of empties and buying reconditioned, do both in one move. We can deadhead one direction with reconditioned product and come back with your empties.

We bias our quoting toward backhaul-friendly schedules because it's cheaper for you and lower-carbon for the world. It's almost the only piece of operations where doing the right thing and the cheap thing line up perfectly.

Last fall we ran a six-week experiment to see how much backhauling actually saved. Of 84 outbound truck-loads, 71 had a paid backhaul booked before the truck left the yard. Average savings per load: $310 against the empty-return baseline. Total saved across that window: about $22,000. That's six weeks of one truck. Backhauling is the single best thing a small fleet can do for its margins.