The one-line version: J.B. Hunt's 2015 operating expense stack
A 10-K does not hand you a mystery. It hands you a ranked list of where the money goes, expressed as a percent of revenue. That percent-of-revenue view is the single most portable skill you can steal from it.
Here is J.B. Hunt's 2015 operating expense breakdown, straight from the FY2015 Form 10-K filed with the SEC (dollars in millions, share of total operating revenues):
| Operating expense line | 2015 amount | % of revenue |
|---|---|---|
| Rents and purchased transportation | $2,995 | 48.4% |
| Salaries, wages and employee benefits | $1,393 | 22.5% |
| Fuel and fuel taxes | $316 | 5.1% |
| Depreciation and amortization | $340 | 5.5% |
| Operating supplies and expenses | $223 | 3.6% |
| Insurance and claims | $74 | 1.2% |
| General and administrative | $68 | 1.1% |
| Operating taxes and licenses | $43 | 0.7% |
| Communication and utilities | $19 | 0.3% |
| Total operating expenses | $5,471 | 88.4% |
The numbers above are from J.B. Hunt's 2015 10-K. Two lines carry the whole story: rents and purchased transportation plus salaries together account for nearly 71% of revenue. Everything else is rounding error by comparison.
Why a trucking 10-K matters to your store
You are not J.B. Hunt. But the discipline behind an "operating ratio" is the same discipline that decides whether your store keeps money. Operating ratio is just total operating expenses divided by revenue — 88.4% here means the company spent about 88 cents to earn a dollar, per the 10-K.
For a print-on-demand operator, the equivalent question is blunt: what is my operating ratio after product, fulfillment, ads, and fees? Most sellers can quote their revenue and their ad spend but have never stacked every cost as a percent of sales the way a 10-K forces you to.
If you have never built that stack, start with the ecommerce ops economics hub, which frames the money mechanics behind the line items below.
Reading the stack line by line
The dominant line: purchased transportation is J.B. Hunt's "COGS"
Rents and purchased transportation is 48.4% of revenue and it fell 2.9% in 2015, mostly because the fuel component that third-party rail and truck carriers passed through got cheaper, according to the 10-K. Read that sentence twice. Their single biggest cost is money paid to outside providers who move the freight.
That is your supplier bill. In POD, the amount you pay Printify, Printful, or Gelato to produce and ship each order is your rents-and-purchased-transportation line — the cost you do not control by working harder, only by pricing, product mix, and supplier choice. It deserves the same top-of-the-stack scrutiny J.B. Hunt gives it, which is why cutting product and fulfillment costs moves your operating ratio more than trimming any small line.
The second line: salaries behave differently
Salaries, wages and employee benefits rose 8.1% in 2015, driven by higher driver pay and more office staff amid a tight driver market, the filing notes. Notice it moved the opposite direction from purchased transportation in the same year.
That is the lesson: cost lines do not move together. A solo store's version of "salaries" is your own time and any VA or contractor spend. It is real even when you do not cut yourself a paycheck, and pretending it is zero is how sellers convince themselves a thin-margin product is fine.
Fuel: the volatile input you can't control
Fuel and fuel taxes dropped 31.0% in 2015 purely on lower fuel prices, per J.B. Hunt — a swing management did not choose. Every operator has a fuel line: for you it is ad costs and shipping surcharges that move with the market, not with your effort. Model your economics so a rise in that line does not erase your margin.
Build your own operating-expense statement
The whole point of reading a 10-K is to copy its format. Here is the same treatment applied to a hypothetical store we made up doing 340 orders a month at a chosen $31 average order value — $10,540 in monthly revenue — with $2,800 in Meta spend. This is an illustrative example, not a market claim, and every figure below is plain arithmetic you can reproduce.
| Line | Monthly amount | % of revenue |
|---|---|---|
| Product + fulfillment paid to supplier ($12 × 340) | $4,080 | 38.7% |
| Ad spend (Meta) | $2,800 | 26.6% |
| Payment processing (2.9% + $0.30 per order) | $408 | 3.9% |
| Apps + Shopify subscription | $120 | 1.1% |
| Total operating expenses | $7,408 | 70.3% |
| Operating income | $3,132 | 29.7% |
Your operating ratio here is 70.3% — spend 70 cents to earn a dollar. That is a healthier ratio than J.B. Hunt's 88.4%, which makes sense: an asset-light store carries no fleet. But the risk hides in the top two lines, just like the 10-K. Product-plus-ads is 65.3% of revenue, so a supplier price bump or a rise in ad costs hits you where it hurts most.
Divide operating income by orders and you get $3,132 ÷ 340 = $9.21 of operating profit per order. That per-order number is the one that tells you whether a new product or a new campaign is actually worth running.
To get the supplier line right, the mechanics of computing cost of goods sold matter — for POD a refunded item is never restocked, so the production cost is gone the moment it ships.
What the line items still don't show
A 10-K stack, even a good one, is a monthly or quarterly average. It cannot tell you that Product A nets $14 an order while Product B quietly loses two dollars once you load its true ad cost and payment fees. Averages hide your worst SKUs behind your best ones.
That per-order truth is what Victor, the AI employee inside PodVector AI, computes — pulling your live Shopify orders, your Meta and Google ad spend, and your Printify, Printful, or Gelato supplier costs into one true per-order profit figure, then delivering the report to your Google Drive. Victor is not a dashboard you log into to squint at charts; it is an operator that assembles the numbers and, with your approval on any action it takes, helps you act on them.
If you want your own operating-expense stack built from live data instead of a spreadsheet you update once a quarter, start with PodVector AI.
Once you can see per-order profit, the last discipline is booking it correctly, which is where recording cost of goods sold closes the loop between the P&L view above and clean books.
FAQs
What were J.B. Hunt's total operating expenses in 2015?
About $5.47 billion on roughly $6.19 billion of operating revenue, leaving about $716 million of operating income and an 88.4% operating ratio, according to the 2015 10-K. The largest single line was rents and purchased transportation at 48.4% of revenue.
What is an operating ratio and why should a store owner care?
Operating ratio is total operating expenses divided by revenue — the share of every sales dollar consumed before operating profit. J.B. Hunt's was 88.4% in 2015, per the filing. For a store, computing your own operating ratio forces every cost — supplier bill, ads, fees, apps — into one comparable percent-of-revenue view.
Why did J.B. Hunt's fuel costs fall while wages rose in the same year?
Fuel and fuel taxes fell 31.0% on lower fuel prices, while salaries and benefits rose 8.1% on higher driver pay and more staff, the 10-K explains. It is a clean reminder that cost lines move independently — you have to watch each one, not just the total.
Which POD cost line is the equivalent of "rents and purchased transportation"?
Your supplier bill — what you pay Printify, Printful, or Gelato to produce and ship each order. Like J.B. Hunt's dominant line, it is the biggest slice of the stack and the one where pricing and product mix, not extra effort, decide the outcome.
How do I find the per-order profit that the expense stack averages away?
Build the stack per SKU rather than store-wide, loading each product's true supplier cost, its share of ad spend, and payment fees. That order-level math is exactly what PodVector AI's Victor computes from your live Shopify, ad-platform, and supplier data, so you see which products actually pay.