Years ago, many years ago, I used to sell a little wood to make a little spending money. My dad cut 5ft pulp wood and hauled it on a flatbed ton truck most of my life. I learnt years ago what a cord of wood looks like stacked on a ton truck. I have a buddy that sells around a 100 truck loads a year on his 3/4 ton truck. He charges $100 per load. He throws it in the bed and rounds it up pretty high and calls it a cord. He calls me up time to time and asks me if I need a load. Usually he only calls if he has a load on his truck he cant get rid of. I have bought a few loads off him, but have never paid his asking price, I usually give him $50 a load and he accepts it because he needs to get rid of it and he knows I dont really need it. We have stacked the wood in my shed and measured out his full advertised cords a few times. Most wood I have ever gotten is about 2/3 of a cord and that was a really big load on his truck. You simply cant get a full cord of wood on a 8ft bed truck if its thrown loose in the bed. To do so would mean it would have to have side boards on the bed that extends about a foot above the top of the cab and the wood would have to be rounded up pretty good. Even stacked tight in the same truck bed, the wood would have to be stacked almost all the way to the top of the cab.
Advertised prices for wood varies a good bit in my area. Like every where else, you have lots of sellers and lots of buyers that dont know what a real cord of wood is. Most dont know the difference between seasoned wood and green wood. Lots of sellers around here will cut wood into rounds this summer, split it right before selling it, and call it seasoned.
I dont sell fire wood, but if I did My prices would probably be in the $250 for a full cord range. I would only sell full cords delivered in my dump trailer and dumped not stacked. My 6x10 dump trailer will haul a full cord stacked, with slightly rounded in the middle, with my 2ft high side boards. If I extend the sideboards to be 3ft high I could haul a full cord dumped in the trailer. Either way, I am not into stacking wood for anybody other than myself, so if a customer wants the wood, fine, if not thats ok to.
The way I see it, there are plenty of folks that buy wood, most have been burnt by other wood sellers. I am not into dealing with argumentative customers, so its my wood, you want it, pay my price and agree with my terms and if you dont buy it, someone else will. Of course, I am not trying to build a firewood business, but I can tell you that if you start letting customers dictate how you run your business, they will run it into the ground for you and you will end up worn out and broke.
Set your prices, deliver what you say you will deliver, and do what you say you will do, and let the fly by niters drive there customers to your doors. And they will drive their customers to your door by selling green wood as seasoned, by shorting customers on volume, and by them selling out and not being able to deliver on demand.
