/Insights — Route Delivery · October 9, 2026
Cost per drop tells you more than cost per kilometre
Kilometre-based costing makes long routes look expensive and dense urban routes look cheap. In distribution the opposite is often true: the expensive part is the stop, not the distance.
A delivery point that takes forty minutes to unload, needs a two-hour window and accepts three cases costs more than a rural drop forty kilometres further out that takes six minutes and accepts a pallet.
Price the stop. Then decide which delivery points deserve daily service, which move to a weekly route, and which should be consolidated into a bigger, less frequent drop.