If you searched this, you probably wanted the raw figure. You have it above. But the reason a trucking company's decade-old expense statement is worth ten minutes of your time is that it is a clean, public example of the discipline most operating stores skip: sorting every dollar you spend into named lines and measuring each one against revenue.
The full 2015 operating-expense breakdown
Here is how J.B. Hunt's fiscal 2015 costs sorted out, from its 2015 Form 10-K. Every figure and percentage below comes from that filing.
| Operating expense line | 2015 | Share of revenue |
|---|---|---|
| Rents and purchased transportation | ~$2,999M | 48.4% |
| Salaries, wages and employee benefits | ~$1,394M | 22.5% |
| Depreciation and amortization | ~$341M | 5.5% |
| Fuel and fuel taxes | ~$316M | 5.1% |
| Operating supplies and expenses | ~$223M | 3.6% |
| Insurance and claims | ~$74M | 1.2% |
| General and administrative | ~$68M | 1.1% |
| Operating taxes and licenses | ~$43M | 0.7% |
| Communication and utilities | ~$19M | 0.3% |
Two lines — the cost of moving freight and the cost of paying people — swallow roughly 71% of revenue. Everything else combined is a rounding error by comparison. That concentration is the first lesson: in most businesses, two or three lines decide whether you make money, and the rest is noise you can watch quarterly instead of daily.
What actually moved year over year
The 2015 report is more interesting for what changed. According to the same 10-K, fuel and fuel taxes fell about 31% versus 2014 because fuel prices dropped, while salaries, wages and benefits rose roughly 8% as the company raised driver pay and added headcount.
That is the second lesson. A single input price (fuel) swung a whole cost line by nearly a third in one year — and the company's operating ratio still improved, to 88.4% from 89.8% the prior year, because the savings outran the wage increases. Costs are not static. The job is to know which line is moving, in which direction, and why.
Why a POD operator should care
You do not run trucks. But you run the same machine: revenue in, a stack of cost lines out, profit as the remainder. The trucking version has fuel and driver pay as its big two. Your version has ad spend and cost of goods sold. The framework is identical, and it is the one we lay out in the ecommerce ops economics hub.
The operating ratio J.B. Hunt reports — total operating expenses divided by revenue — is the single number to steal. At 88.4%, they kept about eleven and a half cents of operating profit per revenue dollar. Do you know yours? Most operating POD stores cannot answer that in under a minute, because their costs live in four disconnected places: Shopify for fees and payouts, Meta and Google for ad spend, and the supplier dashboard for print costs.
Building your own operating-expense statement
Say you run a store doing 340 orders a month at a $31 average order value. That is $10,540 in monthly revenue. Let's sort it into J.B. Hunt-style lines.
Your "rents and purchased transportation" equivalent — the cost of producing and moving the goods — is your POD supplier bill. Say each order carries $11 of product cost plus $5 shipping paid to Printify or Printful. That is $16 per order, or $5,440 a month: 340 × $16 = $5,440. As a share of revenue: $5,440 ÷ $10,540 = 51.6%. That is your single biggest line, right where J.B. Hunt's is.
Your "salaries and wages" equivalent, if you are a solo operator, is really your ad spend — the cost of acquiring the demand. Say you spend $2,800 a month on Meta. That is $2,800 ÷ $10,540 = 26.6% of revenue.
Now the small lines. Shopify payment processing at roughly 2.9% plus 30 cents per order runs about $407 a month: (2.9% × $10,540) + (340 × $0.30) = $306 + $102 = $408. Your Shopify subscription is another line. App subscriptions, another.
Add the big two and you are already at 78.2% of revenue gone before a single small line. Your operating ratio is climbing toward the danger zone fast — and that is before returns, chargebacks, and reprints, which for POD are pure loss because a printed item cannot be restocked. We walk through that unrecoverable-COGS math in the guide to inventory and cost of goods sold.
The line most POD stores get wrong
J.B. Hunt could measure fuel to the dollar because it flowed through one accounting system. Your equivalent lines flow through four systems that never talk to each other, so the "true" per-order number is almost always fuzzier than you think.
The classic error is treating COGS as just the base product price and forgetting the per-order shipping, the supplier's handling, and the processing fee that rides on every sale. Under-count those and your reported margin looks healthy while your bank balance quietly shrinks. Getting this line right — and recording it consistently — is the whole subject of recording cost of goods sold correctly.
From a static report to a live one
J.B. Hunt's 2015 statement was a snapshot filed once, months after the year ended. That is fine for a public filing and useless for running a store, where fuel prices — or ad costs — can move a line by a third in weeks.
This is the gap Victor closes. PodVector AI's Victor is an AI employee that connects to your Shopify store, your Meta Ads and Google Ads accounts, your Printify, Printful, or Gelato supplier, and your Klaviyo — and computes your true per-order profit across all of them, the cost lines stitched back into one statement. Victor is not a dashboard you have to read; it does the sorting J.B. Hunt's accountants did, on your live data, and can deliver the resulting profit reports straight to your Google Drive.
Every action Victor takes on your behalf is approval-gated — it can even draft a customer-support reply and wait for you to approve the send — so you stay in control while the arithmetic stays current. If you want the pattern behind an always-on operating statement, the AI cost of goods sold transformation piece goes deeper, and the ecommerce operations platform overview shows where it fits.
You can put Victor on your own numbers and see your real operating ratio the way J.B. Hunt saw theirs.
FAQs
What were J.B. Hunt's total operating expenses in 2015?
About $5.47 billion, against roughly $6.19 billion in operating revenue, for around $716 million in operating income, according to the 2015 Form 10-K. Total operating expenses fell about 1.1% versus 2014 while revenue was roughly flat.
What was J.B. Hunt's biggest operating expense line in 2015?
Rents and purchased transportation, at about $2,999 million — roughly 48.4% of revenue — per the 10-K. Salaries, wages and benefits were second at about $1,394 million, or 22.5%. Those two lines alone accounted for the large majority of costs.
What is an operating ratio, and why does it matter to a store owner?
The operating ratio is total operating expenses divided by operating revenue — an SEC investor bulletin describes reading these income-statement relationships as the core of a 10-K. J.B. Hunt's was 88.4% in 2015. For your store, it is the fastest read on whether your cost lines are eating your revenue, and it is the one number worth checking every month.
Why did J.B. Hunt's fuel costs drop so much in 2015?
Fuel and fuel taxes fell about 31% from 2014 because the price of fuel dropped, per the 10-K. It is a clean example of one input price swinging an entire cost line in a single year — the same way a rising ad cost per acquisition can swing your largest controllable line.
How do I build this kind of expense breakdown for my POD store?
Start by listing your cost lines the way J.B. Hunt did: supplier product cost, supplier shipping, ad spend, payment processing, subscriptions, and refunds or chargebacks. Express each as a share of revenue, then track which line moves month to month. Because those figures live in Shopify, your ad platforms, and your supplier separately, Victor pulls them together and computes the true per-order profit for you, with every write action approval-gated.