You order a cord. A truck backs up your driveway, dumps a pile, and drives off. And you have no real way of knowing whether you got what you paid for.
Firewood is one of the last real markets still running on a phone number and a handshake. Somewhere near you there is a person who cuts, splits, and stacks honest wood. Somewhere else there is a family who wants to buy it. Almost nothing connects them except unorganized marketplaces and hope.
So the buyer takes a chance on a stranger. The seller takes a chance on getting paid. And the whole thing rests on the buyer's ability to look at a pile of wood in the dark and somehow know if it is right.
Most people cannot. That is not a knock on them. It is just that nothing about this market was ever built to help.
Here are two numbers that decide whether you got a fair deal, and most people have never been told either one.
Now hold those two numbers up against how firewood really gets sold.
A standard pickup bed holds somewhere around a third of a cord. So when a pickup pulls up and the driver calls it a cord, the math already does not work. Meanwhile words like rick, rack, truckload, and pile get thrown around as if they mean something, and they do not. They have no fixed size. Some states have banned sellers from using them at all.
And seasoned might be the most abused word in the business. It gets promised on the phone and disproved the first time you try to light it.
Nobody should need a tape measure and a moisture meter to avoid getting cheated on firewood.
CordMarket exists to put something solid in the gap between the wood and the person burning it. Not a directory. Not another list of phone numbers. A market with the trust built into it.
It would be easy to tell this story as buyers against sellers. That is not the story.
The people getting hurt worst by firewood's reputation are the honest wood men. The ones who season their wood a full year, stack it right, show up when they said they would, and then have to compete on price against somebody selling half a cord of wet junk out of a pickup. They have no way to prove they are the real thing. So they get treated like a coin flip, same as everybody else.
Give an honest seller a way to prove it, and they win. That is the whole idea. CordMarket is built to make honesty the thing that pays.
We are starting in Texas, one area at a time, signing up sellers we have actually talked to. Not a hundred cities with nobody in them. A handful of places where you open the map and find real people with real wood.
It is a slower way to build. It is the only way this works.
That is the whole promise. No guessing, no gambling, no leap of faith.