VACS in Self serve bays

[Sparkleclean]

Anyone have an opinion on putting vacs into self serve bays?

 

[DiamondWash]

Absolutely not a good idea.

 

[I.B. Washincars]

At first thought, it sounds sensible to have everything at your fingertips within the bay and on the coin box selections. The second thought is that anything and everything is going to get splattered on that hose, trapped in each of those grooves, only to break free once it is inside the customer's car.

In a nutshell, don't even think about it.

 

[soapy]

Your vacs are probably a lower price per minute than your SS bay so you are robbing from yourself by not maximizing your profit.

 

[Dan kamsickas]

Go ahead. We love selling replacement filter bags, motors, and hoses.

 

[pgrzes]

Just go sit at a self serve carwash and watch how long people will sit at a vacuum. They will unload their entire car use one cycle on the vac then if your lucky they will put everything back into car in a specific place, or leave it on the ground. 55 min. later they leave. You got $2. Dont even think about it!!

 

[mac]

You can overcome the money per coin issue with an Etowah meter box timer. It allows you to charge different rates for each function. But you will still have all the other issues. I'd say do it and put a camera in the bay. You will end up with a lot of contributions to Americas Funniest videos.

 

[Sparkleclean]

I have a very slow car wash. 20,000 per year in a tunnel and 3 bay self serve. I only ask because I like to think outside the box. This site does very little in vac sales due to there being a small lot surrounding the building so the vacs aren’t easy to access. My bay 3 self serve is always very slow year round and being in A cold climate the self serve business as well as vac business drops off significantly in winter. My thought was putting the vac in an adjacent room, or attic space, with just the hose in the bay. It would have to get tied into the meter box, and I am ok with the timing being the same as the wash itself. So yes it would cost more to use this vac then the others outside but it would be protected from the elements and possibly cause the revenue in my bay 3 to increase. I’m thinking of only doing it in one bay. I understand the concerns of sucking up water and dirty hoses, but could there be a solution for those things? A different hose in bay then the normal pleated ones? A water remover of some sort? I also wonder if a vac would create enough suction from an attic? I’m not saying I am going to do it but it is a thought I had and I wondered if anyone else has tried it before? Nothing ventured nothing lost....

 

[WikiWash]

Absolutely not a good idea.

Hahahahahahaha! That's funny, Thanks! : )

 

[loewem]

I have a very slow car wash. 20,000 per year in a tunnel and 3 bay self serve. I only ask because I like to think outside the box. This site does very little in vac sales due to there being a small lot surrounding the building so the vacs aren’t easy to access. My bay 3 self serve is always very slow year round and being in A cold climate the self serve business as well as vac business drops off significantly in winter. My thought was putting the vac in an adjacent room, or attic space, with just the hose in the bay. It would have to get tied into the meter box, and I am ok with the timing being the same as the wash itself. So yes it would cost more to use this vac then the others outside but it would be protected from the elements and possibly cause the revenue in my bay 3 to increase. I’m thinking of only doing it in one bay. I understand the concerns of sucking up water and dirty hoses, but could there be a solution for those things? A different hose in bay then the normal pleated ones? A water remover of some sort? I also wonder if a vac would create enough suction from an attic? I’m not saying I am going to do it but it is a thought I had and I wondered if anyone else has tried it before? Nothing ventured nothing lost....

I mostly agree with the comments that this won't work well, but don't see any reason not to give a try in one bay. I wonder if there is a way that you could make a hose reel to retract the hose to a certain place/height when the customer is done. If you put the vac in the attic you will need to run the hose down and retracting it to a certain height would eliminate some of the issues mentioned. Maybe you could put the hose on a boom that would spring back into place? Interesting idea. Good Luck.

 

[Sparkleclean]

I mostly agree with the comments that this won't work well, but don't see any reason not to give a try in one bay. I wonder if there is a way that you could make a hose reel to retract the hose to a certain place/height when the customer is done. If you put the vac in the attic you will need to run the hose down and retracting it to a certain height would eliminate some of the issues mentioned. Maybe you could put the hose on a boom that would spring back into place? Interesting idea. Good Luck.

Thanks, my thought is this, if one bay is always slow and i can add the vac into it maybe i can increase the sales. Maybe, just maybe, customers just switch back and forth from vac to spray without even realizing they run the same timer. How many operators wouldnt love to get $1 per minute for vac time like ss time instead of $1 for 3 minutes...... im not looking to scam anyone, but realisticaly how many people would pay $1 per minute to use an air shamee? But since it is in bay they dont even question it. Its just another option on the timer. I would think the biggest obstacle is water being sucked up and that is tough to overcome. I imagine you could use any hose......

 

[robert roman]

“I only ask because I like to think outside the box.”

That’s great if it’s followed up by acting outside the box. Consider Soapy’s comment about maximizing profit.

“I have a very slow car wash. 20,000 per year in a tunnel and 3 bay self serve….is always very slow year round….possibly cause the revenue….to increase.”

Pretend goal and objective is to increase profit.

Let’s be conservative. Tunnel gross margin is (20,000 X $8.50 X 0.75) or $127,500. Wand is ($1,200 X 3 X 12 X 0.8) or $34,560.

In other words, tunnel is producing almost four times the gross profit as wands.

So, if tunnel volume increases 10 percent, gross margin would go up by $12,750. If wand volume increases 10 percent, gross margin would only go up by $3,456.

Alternatively, wand could be used for detail. 20,000 X 0.1 X $75 X 0.4 is gross margin $60,000.

Here, detail (50/50, express/detail) produces almost double gross profit as wands.

 

[Earl Weiss]

Maybe you could use the same boom used for the in Bay Hand Held blowers. Actual vac could be in the attic or perhaps the equipment room.

 

[Earl Weiss]

Have you tried other ideas to increase Bay revenue? Credit Cars? Bill accepters, hand held blower? Superbay?

 

[Sparkleclean]

There is no possibility of adding detailing here. The labor market sucks really bad here as the opioid epidemic has hit hard. It is not worth the risk to my business/reputation to try to find a good detailer. We wouldn’t make enough money doing it in this market and it would only take 1 bad employee to crush detail profits for the year with sloppy mistakes. I understand trying to maximize profits, hence why I would charge the same price for vacuums as I do for the self-serve bay itself. Would customers use it? I’m not sure, but it’s an idea I’ve been tossing around in my head. My goal is just to increase flow into that third bay by adding another option there. I currently have one bay that has the underbody wash wand, which is not in the other two, and I was thinking about adding the vac to the third bay, the slowest one I have. If, (and I understand this is a big if) customers start using it why not add it to the other bays? Assuming no other major problems arise that is.

I have high def cameras everywhere so finding someone misusing them wouldn’t be difficult if it caused damage. But there has to be a way to make this work, after all there is an in bay air shamee and that is virtually identical to a vac except it blows instead of sucks (insert joke here) it has the same exact hose as a vac, so dirty hoses shouldn’t be any more of a problem with vacs then it is with the shamees. it has the same electrical configuration, the big difference is customers pay $1 per minute to use the shamee and only $1 for 3/4 minutes on an outdoor vac...... can anyone else come up with a way to increase vac revenue to $1 per minute?

Most customers now use credit cards, the pull into the self serve bay and swipe and spray. I’m betting that They wouldn’t think any different about vac price then they do about any other option on that meter box. How many times has a customer said “I have to pay $1 a minute for high pressure water and high pressure water with soap in it” they just push the button, I think the same thing would happen with vacs, once the customer is done washing instead of pulling out to the outdoor vac they would rather just hit the in bay vac button out of convenience.

I understand this wouldn’t work in a large market, but in a small town market with pretty respectful customers, for the most part, it’s got me wondering.....

My three main concerns I think are water being sucked up, which already happens with several dilling Harris combo choice vac/scent/shampoo vacs I have, and is never a MAJOR problem. And vacs having enough suction through long hoses from the attic level to functionally clean well. And the biggest concern is people sitting in the bay to wash windows and clean trunks etc AFTER using the vacs. That would tie the bay up. and it is a common occurrence at vacs where people turn it into a car cleaning event and they are there for 45 minutes to an hour and certainly aren’t using the vac the whole time. But if it happens at the vacs outside, and you lose an hour of vac space to a customer who is having a car cleaning event at $1for every 3 minutes of usage, your potential loss, assuming the customer vacs for 8-12 minutes of that hour, is approximately 16/17$ per hour.
would a Revenue increase from an in bay vacuum going to $1 per minute, like the rest of the bay is, overcome the potential loss from a customer sitting in it for an hour? Same scenario as above means $1 per minute = $60 an hour potential revenue. Same guy vacs for 12 minutes bringing in $12 and you potentially lose $48 dollars per hour, however remember I said this is my LEAST used bay in a small market. I would describe it daily as DRY all the time........

 

[Sparkleclean]

If you had a 5 bay self serve wash and only needed 3 to satisfy the demand what would you do with the other 2? Not exactly my dilemma but similar.... close them? Keep them open? Or find some other way to increase traffic?

I’m here looking for feedback, but I can take the criticism too, because I believe you can’t change for the better if you don’t try and fail a few times first... but if it is a success ...

 

[Sparkleclean]

We have it all, blowers, underbody, Cryptopay, triple foam, brushes, the facility is well kept and maintained, it is just in small town n.h., And it’s probably not possible to increase car counts so we have to find a way to get more out of customers for the same if we want revenue increases. We added hot wax to the tunnel last year with amazing results. Still have 25% of the customers using the top package and we raised the price $4 at the time. That was awesome, but that is probably the top this market will support now at $19 for a top level package in an exterior express tunnel wash. So how do I get more revenue out of a site that most would say is maxed out,

and then I have this self serve bay that is DEAD.....hence the vac idea.... maybe, the one customer that does use that bay hits vac one time, the customer who doesn’t like to stand in wet/snowy weather decides it’s a good place to hide from the elements instead, when it’s 95deg out and sunny, maybe someone wants shade. At some point someone said hey let’s walk the cheeseburgers out to the customers while they wait in the car, until someone else said let’s just have the cars pull up to the “drive up” window instead, and even now, someone new is saying, let’s let them order their food BEFORE they get here on a mobile app and it will be waiting for them when they arrive.....

To me, the more in bay options you have would mean the more time the customer spends in the wash, and as long as your paying the same amount for all of the functions, and paying for all the time your in there, isn’t that good? The only thing I won’t add is tire shine, I don’t want to deal with freezing shine liquid and up here my nights can get down to -10deg+

 

[I.B. Washincars]

Keep in mind that an Air Shammee hose is not dragged inside a car and probably seldom even touches it. Cleanliness of the hose would not be that big of deal for a blower.

 

[robert roman]

Good luck with that.

 

[Dcalhoun]

I didn't see dog wash in your list of amenities. We converted a slow ss bay to a dog wash and have been very pleased ever since. I do like your spirit in looking for something less traditional to increase revenue! Like several others, I generally don't like the vac idea mainly because of the issue of keeping the hose clean and dry. It seems to me an important difference that the blower hose is not on the inside of the customers car like a vac hose. In addition to the occasional guy who muddies the bay, the hose is just going to be wet and who wants to drag a wet vac hose through their car? Good luck and keep thinking outside the box!