Local businesses forced to adapt to soaring gas prices

BY EMILY AYSHFORD eayshford@kenoshanews.com 

    It isn’t exactly laissez-faire, but local businesses say dealing with $3.25 a gallon gas prices has become a fact of life.
    At local trucking company Kutzler Express, Inc., Safety Director George Gregory said the company spends $100,000 a week in fuel — so you can bet they check gas prices every day. “The cost of fuel going up just a few pennies makes a huge, huge difference for us,” he said. When prices rise to where they are now, “profit margin in the trucking industry is almost non-existent.” He pegs his company’s current profit at about 1 percent.
    They do have a small fuel surcharge that customers pay, he said, but that money doesn’t even come close to covering the cost of fuel.
    “We just have to eat the cost and hopefully then at the end of our contracts, the customers will let us renegotiate our contracts” to increase the freight rate, he said.
    They renegotiate once or twice a year, he said.
    High prices also have hurt another fuel-dependent industry — taxi cabs.
    Since prices hit $2.50, Keno Cab Inc. has put a dollar surcharge on all rides, according to owner Tina White.
    “I could raise cab prices, but that’s ridiculous,” she said.
    White said her dispatchers also have directed cabs to conserve gas by having them wait in one spot while waiting for a customer to call.
    “There’s no sense running around town if you have no where to head for,” she said.
    White said she has seen an increase in people who use cabs to go to and from their daily jobs. When it comes to paying for insurance and gas, “it’s cheaper to take a cab,” she said.
    For Domino’s pizza delivery driver Todd Wierzchowski, high gas prices means less hard cash in his pocket — but it isn’t driving him out of the business.
    He goes through two tanks of gas a week — and lately he’s been paying $40 a tank — but his gas budget is offset with a $1 reimbursement he gets for every delivery he makes.
    Since he made 80 deliveries last week, his gas is pretty much covered.
But that $1 doesn’t change — whether gas is $2 or $3 — so what previously might have been a profit now goes straight to his gas tank. So he’s not hurting, but he’s not exactly happy about turning the money around. “I mean, lower gas prices are better for everybody,” he said. Yet high gas prices aren’t pushing people away from volunteering.
    At the Kenosha Area Family and Aging Services, Inc., Executive Director Gary Brown said they are both retaining and recruiting new volunteers for their Meals on Wheels and Volunteer Escort programs. 
    “High prices are not deterring people to come up to help elderly people in the community,” he said. “We’re keeping the current people we have, and we’re getting some new people in ... it’s not a big problem at this stage.
    Volunteers, some of whom receive a small mileage reimbursement, have weathered high gas prices before, he said.
    “I think some of the people for whom that was a concern decided to quit a while back,” he said. “But it seems like the people we have in there now, they are just hanging on.”