Doreen is a stop on the home-heat route I own outside Corning, New York. She is 74. She is a widow, and the oil tank in her cellar holds 275 gallons, and it runs dry every winter because I have made it dry. I am the proud owner of the route that empties her. The Lord sends the snow. The snow sends them to me. When the tank reaches empty this November she will call, and I will come, and I will charge her $4.12 a gallon for the same oil my route delivers at $2.89, plus an $85 trip fee, because the cold is a fact and my schedule is a policy.
The gauge costs $39, wholesale. It tells my dispatch the level in her cellar, and with a level my office fills her on schedule in October, at the ordinary price. Nobody pays the emergency rate for a tank that does not run dry. The gauge would have saved her $270 this winter. It would have cost me $270. That is the whole sentence. I have 340 of them in a box by the loading dock in Corning. I do not install them.
I send her a Christmas card instead. $0.68. It is the only discount I offer.
Here is the arithmetic you should memorize, because it is the arithmetic I have already memorized, and the two of us are not in the same business.
The truck rolls for 150 gallons or it does not roll. That is the house rule. On the route, in October, the price is $2.89 a gallon. A 150-gallon drop is $433.50 — a bill she could look at. But the route is for accounts with gauges, and she has no gauge, and the gauge is in the box. So she is will-call. Will-call waits. She has $1,847 a month, and the month is a longer document than the money. In November, when the first hard night comes, the tank will be empty, and she will call, and she will ask for 150 gallons because 150 is the smallest drop the rule allows. She will sign. The will-call price is $4.12 a gallon. The trip fee is $85. She cannot refuse it, and I have designed it so she cannot refuse it.
The difference on the same oil is $1.23 a gallon. $270, if you count the trip fee. I always count the trip fee.
With a gauge, dispatch fills her in October, at the ordinary price, and nobody has the emergency the margin requires. The gauge would have saved her $270. It would have cost me $270. The box is closed because her emergency is my margin, and my margin is a commitment.
Dave Bovee wrote in Fox News this week that the Iran war explains the timing of your heating bill but not the vulnerability. (Read him here.) He is right that the country runs 130 operable refineries where it ran 301 in 1982. He wants the Constitution Pipeline built — 124 miles from the Pennsylvania fields into New York. A 10-year fight. He says a state that won’t bring in its own fuel “becomes a customer.” He meant it as a complaint. It is the most beautiful sentence I have read this decade.
Every pipeline that does not get built is a deposit in my account. Every permit denied. Every plant that closes under a state limit the Legislature is proud of. New York did not become independent when it blocked the pipe. It became my market. I don’t ship the gas. I ship the alternative, and the alternative is what you buy when the pipe is a dream and the cold is a fact. I am not new. I am what a cold county has always needed: the man with the truck, the calendar, and the prices of both. The state has restored me to it.
Now come down the route with me to the next rung, where the profit is cleaner.
I have a driver on the fuel-oil route outside Glens Falls. She is 54. She has run my bobtail for 9 years. On the coldest morning of the year she is at the wheel of a truck whose cab heater costs $310 to replace and which I have declined to replace since 2023. She wears her own coat. The coat is hers. The heater is mine. The warm hands on the valve that fills the tank under the yard you walked past this morning are hers. I am the proud owner of the route that fills it. She asked for nothing. I gave her nothing. The truck ran. That is not a policy I wrote. It is a policy I found.
One rung below her is Ruth. Ruth is not my employee. She is my customer, and that is the whole advantage. An employee’s cold is a claim on my insurance. A customer’s cold is a public expense that ends the day the tank fills. Ruth is a widow on Ridge Street. She has a grandson with asthma in a third-floor walk-up. Her tank runs dry on the schedule I set. When it does, she calls, and she pays, and the boy’s inhaler is refilled on someone else’s ledger. I keep the yield of the hands I don’t own and the maintenance falls to the state that I also don’t pay into. The county health department opened a file last winter on her block. I have not read the file. The woman in Albany who takes those calls told me there’s a number printed on top. Numbers are my profession, and I did not ask her for the number.
The poor are always with us. The gauge is always in the box.
I am not an outlier. I am a curriculum.
I have taught this for 30 years at Warden University under the Hayek-Friedman chair, and every spring I send 40 students out to design the rate structures you live under. One of them already does. Her name is in the fine print of your last gas increase, under regulatory affairs. She was a B student. She is better at this than I am. She moved the fixed-charge increase into a month where a residential customer wouldn’t feel it until August, which is 4 months after anyone remembers to be angry. I gave her an A retroactively. There is no version of this letter that empties your inbox of men like me, because I don’t produce me. I produce them. They graduate on schedule. A faculty does not retire. It graduates.
Isaiah saw the thing. Chapter 10, opening verses:
Woe unto them that decree unrighteous decrees, and that write grievousness which they have prescribed; to turn aside the needy from judgment, and to take away the right from the poor of my people, that widows may be their prey, and that they may rob the fatherless!
He had the decree-makers in view. Read it again and tell me he had not seen Albany. The difference between his prey and mine is small. His was robbed by the decree. Mine is delivered to me by the decree. We are a system.
I have read the 10-year forecast. They are colder, every one. I have not read the part about the people.
I keep a box by the loading dock in Corning. The box has 340 gauges in it. The commission intern came to see me in September. He asked why I don’t put gauges in the tanks. He asked the way a man asks when he knows the answer and hopes it is different. I drew him the route. He left. The box is still full. The gauge is still in it.
My tanks are full.
Doreen’s tank is at 4%.
Sterling A. Varice holds the Hayek-Friedman Chair and serves as Dean of Instruction at Warden University’s College of Business and Economics in Richmond, Virginia. He is the author of three textbooks: Divine Mandates for Labor Utilization, Social Obligations for Profit Maximization, and Calibrated Deprivation: A Manager’s Guide to Employee Motivation.