Free Vacs -- A thinker

[Earl Weiss]

Chgo area EE at $3.00 in a heavily competitive area changes his stand alone vacs to free. Puts up signs, and puts a button on the faceplate saying "Push for Free Vac" Button activates timer for 5 minutes.

He does not cover the coin slots, just disconnects the mech from the timer.

After 6 months someone says "You better check the vacs, people are putting $ in them." Sure enough, he watches a guy insert quarters and then push the button .

So, he empties the vacs and pulls out $500.00

 

[DavidM]

I guess this is more evidence that many customers don't read our signs and "Old habits die hard"

When our inbay automatics were new we did a couple promotions. We gave away free carwashes all day on a Saturday. Customers entered a code from the newspaper to get the wash. We also posted the code and instructions directly on the Autocashiers. We still had about 10% of our customers purchase car washes that day. (We were giving away our top package too)

Habits - we added pay stations at our tunnel. About 10-12 customers ran into our gates over the course of 6-7 months. Most of them said something like "that was never there before, I always just drove through" Apparently they drive out of habit, regardless of what is in front of them.

 

[mac]

I once went to a wash that had an old coin box for an automatic mounted in front of a bay, but no automatic there. It had been removed years ago. I suggested to the owner he remove the box just to make the place better looking. It was full of quarters. I then suggested he install more coin boxes.

 

[MEP001]

I once went to a wash that had an old coin box for an automatic mounted in front of a bay, but no automatic there. It had been removed years ago. I suggested to the owner he remove the box just to make the place better looking. It was full of quarters. I then suggested he install more coin boxes.

I've seen the exact same thing a number of times, as well as money in air machines and vacs with no hoses, money in vendors with no mechanism or pull-knob, bays roped off where customers had pushed quarters right through the tape across the coin slot - there are a lot of people out there who can't think for themselves.