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I would go with touch-free. You have three choices when it comes to your competition
1. Be less than (should never be taken)
2. Be better than
3. Be different then
With the competition, I feel #3 is the way to go.
It's tough to get a good return on investment from buying just a self-service wash. The items are low ticket, and many people over the years have migrated to getting a machine to do all the washing. It's not by accident that few pure self-services are being built these days. In fact, it's rare...
No, express car washes do have attendants. Someone has to load the vehicles onto the conveyor. I do know of a place that has an unattended conveyor tunnel (not of the express variety), and I have no idea how he can do that without confused customers and lots of property damage.
With regard to...
What Ed wrote applies to us.
As for getting their information, we have forms they fill out. If someone does not want to leave contact information, we do not force the issue. We use the info to contact them if their payment does not go through. That is what we do with our IBA touch-frees.
We...
Bingo. I know a big full service chain in my area that opted to end a relationship with a contractor they used for building. They went with someone inexperienced, and it was a disaster for a good while. They started calling subcontractors of the contractor to redo and thus fix the problems.
I don't believe a surcharge for credit card customers at a pay kiosk would work out well. People are not smart, and I see there being a lot of confusion and anger over different pricing for the same things. Even smart people can get angry or confused because of the way our business is designed...
We notify our members when we increase prices.
When we raised our per car customers last time, which was the same time as the membership, we did use signs for the first times ever. I would have preferred not to, but my dad did. It didn't hurt anything.
Raising prices the last time was the...
We have touch-free IBAs, and I would say we have an average of four washes per month per customer. In comparison, we have a friction tunnel where the average is two.
I find that people do drop memberships and sign back up. Overall, I'd say the biggest reason someone leaves permanently is...
I agree 100%. I don't think we're going to see any new sites built for a while. I don't see IBAs being built for that matter. The only construction I see right now are express exterior tunnels.
It depends on how far along they are. If they've broken ground, they'll open it, and I don't believe they have any future start-up car washes in the pipeline.
And then the Democrats deny there is a recession going on. It used to be that when there was a recession, the party in power would acknowledge it and try to spin policies and the hope the future. Now we get gaslit.
Unfortunately, I don't have an answer for you. I'm curious to see what answers are myself.
My hot take upon reading what you're city's doing is, "Gotta love government."
On our tunnel, we offer a free vac token for those who buy the top wash and members. We let the customer ask us for a token, or if we see someone who bought the wash pull to a vac, we run one over to them. That way, we don't end up with hoarding of tokens.