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Wickey's employee Donald Sizemore of York City unloads items from an Enterprise rental truck. (Bill Kalina Photo)
There are perhaps some circumstances under which a quirky vehicle can be fun, like maybe if you're a teenager behind the wheel of an old beater.

But quirky is decidedly unpopular if you run a busy catering company and business depends on being able to reliably reach a destination two hours away.

York Township-based Wickey's Catering was being nickeled and dimed with repairs on its fleet of old green box trucks when executives decided to do something unusual: sell all of them.

"The vehicles that we did have had aged significantly, and they were in the shop all of the time," said operations manager Kevin Kilishek. "We had 14 trucks at one time ... we were down to seven."

Problems: The unreliable trucks were gobbling the Springwood Road company's disposable income, Kilishek said. And there were times that the size of the truck the company had available didn't match the company's needs. If a worker needed a 16-foot truck but only had a 22-footer available, the company would have to waste gas to haul around a half-empty truck.

Considering the cost per mile of operation and depreciation on the old green trucks, the catering company compared the cost of buying, leasing or renting new trucks.

In the process, executives realized they could save money -- and headaches -- if they just rented.

Since September, the upscale catering company has been serving clients in seven states without a single company-owned truck.

The company rents four trucks on a

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monthly basis, ordering more when needed, Kilishek said.

Wickey's is paying between 15 and 20 percent less for transportation by renting just the trucks the company needs when it needs them, he said.

"If I have a problem with one of the vehicles, we just call Enterprise (commercial truck rental) and they replace it," he said.

Newer and cheaper: The trucks are newer than what Wickey's would have been able to afford, and Wickey's now has access to a larger fleet of vehicles than it would have been able to afford if it had to buy them, Kilishek said.

Now the caterers have the right number of trucks and the right type of trucks all of the time, he said.

Wickey's Caterers caters more than 750 events per year, ranging from event planning and catering for individual clients to Fortune 100 corporations and political and charitable organizations.

--Reach Christina Kauff man at 505-5436 or ckauffma n@yorkdispatch.com.