If volume is the same spread out over more days, to keep profit the same you will need to reduce hours per day. Larger operations will be able to adapt and make profit, but smaller ones won't be able to make it work, especially in rural or spread out suburban routes. In those areas where more miles are driven daily, your extra fuel and maintenance costs will be 16% higher.
It comes down to whether your driver spends more hours driving, or more hours making deliveries. I had 400 mile routes where I spent at least 8 hours of a ten hour day actually driving with maybe 40 deliveries of 2-3 minutes each , and other routes in tight city areas where I only drove 20 miles and made maybe 150 deliveries of maybe 2 minutes each, meaning about 5 hours or more NOT driving. With 16% fewer deliveries per day, I would have saved at least an hour a day, made up by working seven days, instead of six, and only adding 20 miles of vehicle costs on the seventh day. This is a huge difference from adding 400 miles on a rural route, and only saving maybe 15 minutes of making deliveries. Saving 15 minutes per day for 6 days will NOT pay for the extra driver on the seventh day, let alone the added vehicle costs on a rural route. On a city route, you might be able to save the 1+ hour per day and have other drivers cover parts of what now takes a full route, using six drivers instead of seven, for example. You can't do that with rural routes. Even if you have 6 routes, and only one or two of them is rural, the seventh day could greatly affect your bottom line.
