Fill-ups just got more painful. National gasoline averaged $4.228 a gallon in the week of July 27, according to EIA weekly data — and for a fleet running ProMasters and Transits, that's not a background number, it's a line item eating into every route.
Most DSP fleets run gasoline, not diesel — Ram ProMaster 2500 and Ford Transit 350 are the workhorses, averaging 18-19 mpg fully loaded. At $4.228/gal, a van covering 120 miles a day burns through roughly $28 in fuel before a single stop is scored. Multiply that across a 40-van fleet running six days a week, and fuel alone approaches $6,800 in a single week — before maintenance, insurance, or a single driver hour is paid.
The pressure compounds because gasoline has stayed stubbornly elevated through the summer driving season, when demand typically pushes prices higher anyway. Operators who built their per-stop cost models around spring pricing are already behind. A 10-cent swing in gas price doesn't sound like much until it's applied across a fleet running hundreds of stops a day, week after week — it shows up in the P&L as a margin bleed that's easy to miss until the quarter closes.
The operators managing this best aren't the ones hoping prices fall. They're the ones who've already rebuilt their cost-per-stop math around current fuel numbers and are renegotiating rate cards or route density with that real number in hand — not last quarter's assumption.
See how this affects your cost per stop — free calculator at pexara.ai/calculator