Shutterstock

Imagine working for a trucking company, and a customer thinks your hourly rate for a job is too expensive. Would you be willing to negotiate a flat rate instead?

In this story, one man is in this situation, and he listens to what the customer has to say. He also does some basic math and thinks about how to respond.

It turns out that he’s smarter than the customer.

Keep reading to see how the story plays out, and the math adds up.

Well that’s too much money.

My dad is a manager for a trucking company. He’s in charge of hiring drivers, finding jobs, and deciding what drivers to put on what jobs.

A few weeks ago, someone came to my dad and asked how much he would charge to do a few deliveries over the next few months.

My dad let him know that it would be $115/hour.

“well that’s too much money!”

The customer wants OP’s dad to price match a competitor.

Dad explains to him that all of his drivers are already on a job that’s paying $115, so my dad can’t just put a driver on a job worth less money, when they could be making that much.

This guy let’s my dad know that another company said they will charge a flat rate instead of a per hour rate. And they are charging $850 to take one load to this site and back.

My dad thinks for a few minutes and tells him, “I’ll match that price for a month, and see if it’s worth it to keep doing that. By the end of the month I’ll let you know if we can keep the $850/load.”

All he needed to do was some basic math.

Now, my dad is pretty good at math.

All he did to decide if the $850 would be worth it, was to calculate the time it would take to run a load and if it was less than $115 it was no go.

Thing is.. the drive to the site and back was only an hour and a half.

At my dad’s original offer, it would have been around $175/load unless there was bad traffic. But it would still take around 7 hours to be worth $850.

Apparently, math isn’t the client’s strength.

Let’s see how Reddit responded.

This is basically what happened.

This is true.

One person points out the real problem.

Another person vents about people who are bad at math.

The thing is, the client didn’t have the data he needed in order to know what was a good deal and what wasn’t. Instead of assuming a flat rate is a good idea, he should’ve asked OP’s dad for a breakdown and estimate about how long the delivery would take. Then the client would have the data he needs to know in order to do basic math and realize the error in his logic.

It’s hard to make a good decision when you don’t have all the relevant information.