January 22, 2018
Dear Spalding Gas Customer,
As you have experienced the last few weeks, we have had the first cold winter weather that our area has seen in years. This extreme cold with wintry precipitation has wreaked havoc on our delivery schedule. Like most of you, we may have been lulled into believing that winter would never return for us like we knew years ago.
The last two winters were so warm that many of you used propane very sparingly and our delivery trucks never had to run long hours or weekends. This winter is much different as we are in our fourth week of 12 plus hour days and working every Saturday all day as well. And we were still not keeping up.
During last week we had a 4 or 5-day backlog of calls and it may take all this week to bring our schedule back to some semblance of normal. This may have caused some of you to have to wait longer than you would have wanted and even to run out of propane. For this I apologize.
Many of you have told me you had not realized that we had a schedule for delivery to each area that we serve. As we provide propane into 15 counties, we had found that it was not efficient for our drivers to try and cover their entire 5 or 6 counties daily. So, the driver that serves Monticello Georgia does so on Fridays and he serves Molena on Mondays rather than go to both every day. This is more cost efficient and helps us hold the cost of propane down.
We will still deliver on days other than the scheduled day for your area if it is an emergency, but there is a service charge of $30 to come off the scheduled day. Please try to order your propane early so that you can take delivery on the scheduled day. Or better yet, join our Automatic Keep Full program where we keep your tank filled and you never have to worry about your propane inventory. There is a savings of $.05 per gallon if you let us keep track of your propane for you. All we need is to set you up with a credit account, a credit or debit card on file to bill you or allow us to draft your checking account (an additional $.02 savings per gallon) each delivery.
This program was implemented in the fall without any notice and you let me know you would have appreciated being made aware. This should have been promoted in our newsletter and I am doing so now, but I apologize for having not done so earlier.
Thank you for being a Spalding Gas customer. I know you have many choices for your propane supplier and we want to continue to be the best propane marketer in the area, so please let me know if you have suggestions for ways we can improve our service.
Sincerely,
Darrell Whatley
President
770-228-8484 office770—468-4262 cell