Free can be the enemy of efficiency. Overall efficiency serves everyone. Each of us acts in our own self interest. Economics teachers like to use a basic pencil as the perfect example of how well the system works. You have suppliers of wood, graphite, metal, and rubber. These items get supplied to a manufacturer who makes the pencil. It gets transported to market and sold at a store for a nominal cost. Now, imagine that the rubber eraser were free. It would throw off the balance.
When anything is free, it tends to be wasted. Overall efficiency is sacrificed when free is wasted. In the case of the pencil, if rubber were free, the eraser would be bigger. To err is human, but the eraser should wear out at about the same time the graphite does. If the eraser is oversized it will still get thrown away when the graphite runs out. The pencil becomes less efficient.
That got me thinking about a recent drop and hook load. I dropped off a loaded trailer at a consignee and picked up an empty. The empty trailer had remnants of pallets, and plastic inside it. It wasn't that big a deal.. My next shipper was a drop and hook shipper about 100 miles away. I had about 30 minutes of drive time left and there was a place that I could park about 15 miles from the consignee. I cleaned the trailer while it was parked. It wasn't that big a deal to put my broom together and sweep it out. I keep my extra “shopper” plastic bags. I gathered the kindling in one pile, and swept the paper plastic and dust into the plastic bag and disposed of it properly. No one got billed for my time.
The most efficient way to clean the trailer out would have been for the consignee to do it. No one would have to climb in out of the trailer. It could get done right at the dock. It takes 5 minutes. It took me about 10. It isn't the end of the world, but it bothers me. In this case, it was not a big deal. It becomes a bigger deal when the driver has to make an extra stop to clean out a trailer. Costs become greater if the trucker has to run out of route to discard the trash.
The trucking industry has developed a culture of free. The problem is that it isn't free. Costs can be hidden. The actual cost is great. The culture of free, has given us turnover rates near 100%. It has given us average driving careers shorter than the average NFL career. It has given us driver trainers with 6 months of experience. Experience matters when it comes to safety as well. The industry will not be as efficient or as safe as it can be until we rid ourselves of the culture of free.