the recruiter at panther said "The average driver makes between four to six thousand a month and his highest paid driver made eleven."
Be sure you know what 'makes' means to the person saying how much a person 'makes'. The recruiter and/or carrier will not know what the OOs and/or drivers 'make' (end up with after expenses), since everyone's expenses are totally different. They will know some of them, the ones which they take right off the top, but they won't and can't know the rest, and even the ones they know may be different for each of those drivers. When someone is talking about 'how much money they make', this will, or should, mean 'net income', and not gross revenue.
When people are talking numbers, you can never be sure what exactly they mean, or if it is exactly true, or how exactly they do their math. Someone might completely believe they're speaking the truth, when you may find out that it's not what you thought, because your and the other person's understanding of the words spoken might be different.
If someone has a vehicle loan payment of $1000 which comes out of their bank on the 1st of each month. Say their insurance is deducted on the 1st of the month, and their monthly cellphone bill, and their qualcomm, and their bank charges, and whatever other expenses they had, and say that first week of the month was really slow and they 'made' negative $2000. Then say the 3 other weeks of the month they ended up with $1000 on the plus side after expenses. That's great, but is someone going to tell you they average $1000/week because 3 out of 4 weeks netted $1000? Or are they going to take into account that they were under by $2000 the first week, which means for that month they really only averaged $250/week ($3000 gained less $2000 lost = $1000 net divided over 4 weeks)?
Same with the people who may have paid the full cost of their van up front. Are they going to include a monthly amount as an expense over the life of the van? Or are they going to pretend that number doesn't come into the equation of their monthly averages? If someone needs a $4000 repair on their van one month, is it expensed against that one month so that perhaps that month they had a negative income, but the rest of the months look good? It's all a matter of the different ways we can do our math and look at things, and even trick ourselves sometimes to make things look better (or worse) than they actually are.
The language differences that I'm talking about really came to light for me when one time a recruiter stated unequivocally that the carrier paid 100% of the FSC to the driver. But when the details were actually revealed, what the recruiter meant was that the drivers get 100% of their 69% of the FSC. They were on a percentage and the same percentage was applied to the FSC. In my language, 100% is not 69%, but in the recruiter's language, it was absolutely 100%, even with a straight face.
I believe in your case the recruiter was telling you what the average driver earns in gross revenue, and those numbers would be totally in line for a van. Now start deducting all of your expenses to see what the drivers might '
make'. Then decide if you'd rather be a supervisor at Walmart or an expediter. Many would still rather be an expediter, many would rather stick with Walmart.
