There is a saying in our industry that goes: “Rock is cheap, moving it around is expensive”. While there certainly are nuances to the business, the general sentiment continues to hold true. 

I’d like to walk the reader through several scenarios to demonstrate how orders of various quantities can impact the landed cost of landscape stone.

Take Bodie, a crushed ¾” rock that is native to Southern California. For this example we are going to say that the project is using the product as decorative ground cover and will be installed at a depth of 3” and the project is located in the city of Anaheim. For the Bodie product each ton will spread out to cover 93 sqft when installed at a 3” depth as determined by our coverage calculator. 

This product will typically be priced out around $50/ton. This is the undelivered material cost of the product.  Now we need to add in the cost of delivery. Remember that all of DSS products are delivered directly from quarry to jobsite to maximize efficiency of trucking and minimize the number of times a product is handled. The flat fee delivery from the Bodie quarry to the Anaheim jobsite is $600.  The maximum a dump delivery truck can carry in the state of California is 25 tons. That delivery truck costs nearly the same to operate if it is loaded with 1 ton of material or the maximum of 25 tons of material, so that delivery cost of $600 is a fixed cost. Let’s take a look at what that does to the landed cost per ton and the corresponding sqft cost for various scenarios.

This helps to illustrate the importance of utilizing the full capacity of a delivery vehicle in order to most efficiently get material delivered to a jobsite. 

So next time you might be wondering how much a particular DSS product would cost per sqft, the answer most likely is: it depends on the quantity and where it must get delivered. In the scenario above there is just over $1 difference per sqft in the costs between ordering 5 tons of Bodie and 25 tons of Bodie.

We have seen this scenario play out to the disadvantage of the installation contractor when they believe they only need 15 tons for a job so that is what they order. After installing the first 15 tons they realized the project actually requires another 10 tons to finish the job. This requires another $600 delivery fee but only $500 more material. 

In summary, when it comes to estimating landscape stone quantities we almost always recommend rounding up to the nearest full truckload if the job permits. Sometimes there may be limited space and budget, but at the very least bumping up the order a few tons should help prevent from additional deliveries being required. In the end this will save time and money as you avoid jobsite downtime waiting for additional material to be delivered along with the actual cost of the extra delivery.