What the sign price does to your diesel volume and margin

Summary

Channels

Retail gallons are a small percentage of your overall volume but they account for half of your margin.

Fiserv is the smallest of the big channels by gallons and the largest by margin. TCH is the largest by gallons and still only a fifth of margin, so the volume does not make up for the small margin on each gallon. Fleets with a deal, on every card together, are most of your gallons at a few cents each.

Each transaction is counted once, on the card it ran on. A rate-card customer billed by Sapp but run on a TCH or Comdata card is counted under TCH or Comdata.

Positioning

Most of your stores are priced under the nearest major, some by a lot.

The majors post high and sell on their fleet and app prices. You sit between them and the independents. The gap differs by store but is consistent over time, so it is a store policy rather than a reaction to the day. You typically change your sign price once every four days.

Sapp BrosCompetitor you followOther truck stops with a posted priceInterstate freight routes

Drag to pan; hold Ctrl or ⌘ and scroll to zoom. Freight routes from the National Highway Freight Network. Truck stops from the EFS price report and the Mudflap app. The competitor you follow is read from price history. Vs your sign is the median over the period of each stop's posted cash diesel against your sign. The map shows the truck stops around each store whose posted price we have, within about 30 miles.

Comparison

The stores that price well under the majors sell about the same retail gallons as the stores that hold level with them while earning a third less on each gallon.

These are different markets with different traffic and different supply, so the data seems to imply this rather than prove it. St. George is the extreme. It sits far under everyone and is the cheapest in its area on most days, and it earns almost no margin on retail gallons at the published rack. Denver and Council Bluffs sit level with the majors and earn the most retail margin in the network. An experiment at a few stores would confirm or overturn this within weeks.

January 2025 through September 2026. Nearest major: the nearest Pilot, Love's or TA. Margin at the published OPIS rack, before your per-store cost adjustment.

Gaps are the median day. Margin at the published OPIS rack; at St. George the cost adjustment is large, so the margin there is higher than shown. Cut matched: the share of a Sapp cut of 3¢ or more that the typical nearby competitor matched within three days.

Competitors

Competitors follow your price slowly, and they follow increases more than cuts.

Across the national price panel, a competitor matches almost none of a move the next day, less than half within three days, and nearly all of it within a week. Cuts are matched about half as often as increases. At your stores, competitors match a cut within three days at Salt Lake City, Cheyenne, St. George and Peru. At the other 11 nobody does.

Posted prices at 216,637 truck stop and competitor pairs nationally, March through September 2026.

Price moves

After your cuts, retail gallons ran a few percent higher and retail margin ran lower. After your increases, the reverse. The gallons never moved enough to pay for the cut.

Moves of 5¢ or more against nearby truck stops. Three days after against the same three weekdays before. Typical range: the middle 80% of single moves.

Retail volume at a store swings about 40% from day to day, so no single move shows anything and only the averages do. You also tend to cut after slow days, and slow days recover anyway, so the gain after a cut is a ceiling.

Price response

The sign price moves every channel a little, and retail gallons less than most.

Prices and volume move together for reasons that have nothing to do with the sign. When the rack jumps, every price and every volume in the area shifts at once. When a store is busy, your pricing rule nudges the price up. So a plain comparison of price and gallons mixes all of that in.

To see what the sign does by itself, we hold the rack, competitors' prices, your margin target and how busy each store had been fixed. What is left is what happens to gallons when the sign changes for no other reason.

A higher sign loses a little volume on every channel, not only retail. Fleets with a deal and Mudflap drivers still pick stops by the sign, which fits what you saw at Ogallala. Mudflap drivers are the most sensitive.

All stores together. Range: the interval we are 95% sure of. Based on 1,161 Sapp moves and 1,644 competitor moves that the rack, competitors' prices and your pricing rule do not explain.

Cuts

When you drop the sign price, you barely capture any additional gallons, and nowhere near enough to cover the decrease in margin.

The sign sits about 42¢ over the rack. Giving up 10¢ on every retail gallon needs about a third more retail gallons to break even, and a 10¢ cut brings in about 2%. The two lines never meet.

Retail gallons only. Gallons from fleets with a deal are not credited. Whether they close the gap is what an experiment would measure.

Raises

A small increase looks profitable at almost every store.

Raise the sign 10¢ and you lose a few percent of retail gallons, a smaller share of deal gallons, and more of Mudflap. You make 10¢ more on every retail gallon you keep. The extra margin outweighs the lost gallons at 17 of 18 stores. Odessa is the exception. The deal side costs little in dollars because those gallons earn a few cents each, but those are the fleet relationships, which is why a raise is worth testing rather than just doing.

Best estimate from history for a 10¢ raise from each store's usual position. Deal margin at 7.3¢/gal against your cost. Not credited: competitors following the raise, which they do about half the time within three days.

This says nothing about a large raise. The estimate comes from moves of a few cents inside the positions you have held. A raise that puts a store above the majors is somewhere you have not been, and the likely shape there is a cliff rather than a slope. Store by store the ranges are wide. At 17 of 18 stores history cannot pin down the size of the response and a test can.

Mudflap

Mudflap volume fell because the saving drivers see in the app shrank, not because a deal changed.

June was a record month and August came back to where May was. The drop came from fewer transactions, not smaller ones, and it showed at most stores. Your Mudflap deals were the same in August as in June apart from a small change at Odessa, and your sign got cheaper against nearby truck stops rather than more expensive.

What changed is the saving drivers see in the app. Mudflap shows your credit price next to a driver price it sets from the rack. At most of your stores the driver price is the rack plus a fixed amount, so the saving on screen is your margin over the rack less that amount and it moves cent for cent with the rack. At the rest the driver price sits halfway between your credit price and your deal and the saving moves half as fast. Either way, when the rack fell in June and your signs held, the saving on screen was large. When the rack climbed back it shrank, and Mudflap volume followed one to three weeks later, as it did in December 2025.

Since September 22 we take a daily snapshot of the app at your stops, so a change on Mudflap's side is visible when it happens.

Experiments

Each pattern above comes from history, where prices moved for many reasons at once. A controlled experiment removes those reasons. Two prices alternate at a store in three-day blocks in an order drawn at random, and the test is judged on margin across every channel.

Retail gallons/day and the day-to-day swing over 21 months; position against the nearest major; the share of your cuts the typical nearby competitor matched within three days.

Thresholds

Cost and earnings

The cut test gives up 10¢ on every retail gallon on its low-price days, about half the days, whether or not anyone responds. That is the whole downside. The raise test, if history is right, earns more than the cut test costs. Gallons from fleets with a deal and from Mudflap are not credited in either table.

Half the days of each test are at the changed price. The raise-test worst case is the revert rule: two blocks of lost gallons before the price goes back.

How it is judged

Written down before the first block. Success is margin per store-day across every channel, at the price each transaction actually paid, higher at the changed price with the low end of the range above zero. The cut test also fails early if retail gallons and deal gallons are both bounded below what break-even needs. The test can stop on any day and the result still holds.

What history says at each cut-test store, and what retail and deal gallons would need to pay for the cut. The cut test is judged against this table; the raise test against the table in Raises.