Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator instructions) Your first question comes from Jeffrey Germanotta – William Blair.
Jeffrey Germanotta – William Blair
Congratulations on a great profit performance in a tough environment. My question relates to gross profit. You've been doing a lot of good things there whether it's the freight initiative, foreign sourcing, raising prices, etc., and you posted a pretty big year over year increase, over 200 basis points. How do you feel about those components and the sustainability of them as you look at softening demand and lower commodity prices in 2009?
Daniel Florness
We're pretty comfortable. We may not stay at the 53%, but we're comfortable in that 52% range as more of our normal trend in the last few quarters, and there's several reasons. One is our outside sales people are working hard at driving revenue from smaller customers where you can make a little higher margin.
Second is, when the commodity prices drop, some of you'll have to give back, but some of it we don't have to give back, understanding that our average customer does $200 to $250. We take out the key accounts, the average customer only does about $200 to $250 in fasteners. So it's not a high visibility item. We can continue. If we offer high service levels we can continue to actually improve our margins as costs come down, now lose our margin.
And the third is transportation. As I said, you can tell I was elated by our progress of the transportation. We've actually kind of shaken the rug on that. We found a bunch of areas we can save money and I'm very confident that we have more room to improve the gross margin with the transportation expenses are going to margin component.
So we're comfortable where we are in gross margin and we believe we can maintain a level at or above where we did in 2008.
Operator
Your next question comes form Adam Uhlman – Cleveland Research.
Adam Uhlman – Cleveland Research
How much did diesel prices and transportation costs boost gross margin in the fourth quarter?
Daniel Florness
You're looking at about, if you look at the fuel costs, I'll touch on that point. Our fuel cost dropped about $4 million from Q3 to Q4 and about half that number, $2 million would have benefited cost of goods.
Adam Uhlman – Cleveland Research
Could you talk about active account growth in the third quarter and then in the fourth quarter what kind of growth rates are you seeing?
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