A scrapyard website willing to talk you out of the drive
Two things decide what a customer actually gets paid, and neither appears on the price board by the road: the deduction for whatever is not metal, and fuel for the round trip. A washing machine is paid for as steel, yet half of it is the concrete counterweight, rubber and plastic; forty kilos of steel scrap from twenty kilometres away leaves seventeen złoty once fuel is subtracted. The calculator on this page works both out in advance and presents the result as a weighbridge ticket — monospaced, with dot leaders and a torn edge along the bottom, exactly the slip handed over after weighing, only visible before the trailer is loaded. For a small load it ends with the stamp "better to wait" and a threshold weight: how much would have to be brought for the same trip to pay for itself. The second mechanism is rarer still in this trade: four checkboxes — paint, concrete, rubber, oil still inside — raise the deduction, and the page converts that into złoty and states how much stays in the customer's pocket if they spend one afternoon cleaning the load. The sentence ends: "We mention it because we would have paid less anyway, explaining nothing." The contact form recomputes the ticket server-side and sends it to the yard with a subject tag and the instruction not to encourage a trip with that quantity. Prices sit beside the date they last changed and one line describing the change, because metal quotations move daily and a yard displaying the same figures for six months is simply not updating them.
