Theresa Neff: Hi, this is Theresa Neff with GSC Logistics and I’m here today with Joe Zepko our Senior Vice President of Strategy. How are you today Joe?
Joe Zepko: Doing fine Theresa, nice to see you. Nice to see you. You know Joe, there is a topic that is on everyone’s lips these days, especially here in California and that is fuel. I know I’m doing my own hedging because I fill up whenever my tank gets halfway empty because I’m not quite sure what’s gonna happen next with fuel prices, I’m afraid they’re gonna keep going up. So I’m trying to hedge a little bit of a discount there. Can you talk to us more about what’s going on with this fuel situation.
Theresa Neff: Wow, that’s a hot topic, isn’t it? And I think, you know, for us who’s trying to come back to Covid now we want to stay back in the house because of the driving costs going into the office, but our drivers are delivering and they could not stop and that’s the thing with drayage companies, all our drivers have to make these deliveries and GSC, whatever scale and agreement we have with the customer is one thing, we pay our drivers at the California scale. The California scale is 6.26 versus the nationals being 5.25. So, that is at least a dollar spread that we have per gallon on the average. And we continue to support these drivers. Now, these drivers are 85 drivers, their own entrepreneurs but we do not push you know, lower scale or anything to them or like a national scale to them. We pay on a California scale so that we support them because we feel they are partners, they’re just like employees and they work for us and deliver certainty to our customers on a daily basis. So we pay them on see a scale and it’s hurting us.
Theresa Neff: Yeah, absolutely. The national scale definitely less than the California scale.
Joe Zepko: The California cost is a real cost. And these drivers are feeling it every day. You know, not only did they have to deal with all the complications in the ports during the covid period. Now they’re hit with this fuel, costs that, that they’re absolutely dealing with. And, it’s definitely a difficult time.
Theresa Neff: Thanks Joe. I appreciate your input. Nice to see you as always, I look forward to catching up with you again and talking more things about fuel.
Joe Zepko: Thank you, Theresa.
