cleaning up mud
Member
2009 is the worst year in 10 years for our business, and if the current weather keeps up in central Texas 2010 does not look much better!!!
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One of the worst YEARS!
- Thread starter cleaning up mud
- Start date
mjc3333
Member
2009 business
2009 was actually one of our better years. Been in business since 1988 3 SS washes. To me it was ALL weather related. For us not too much snow, not too cold, dry weekends. This business is #1 weather related. If the weather does not agree, you are not going to wash cars. My detail business is the same, totally weather related. We get 4 full seasons of weather hot summer cold winter snow etc. My best year was way back in 1989-1990. The cost of doing business, competition, and the weather has taken its toll.
2009 was actually one of our better years. Been in business since 1988 3 SS washes. To me it was ALL weather related. For us not too much snow, not too cold, dry weekends. This business is #1 weather related. If the weather does not agree, you are not going to wash cars. My detail business is the same, totally weather related. We get 4 full seasons of weather hot summer cold winter snow etc. My best year was way back in 1989-1990. The cost of doing business, competition, and the weather has taken its toll.
soapy
Senior Member
I have been working on a way to follow year to year sales and relate them to the weather. I found a site called weather underground that lets me do this. ON the website you can get a calendar brought up for every month of every year based on your zip code. The map gives a day by day weather report for highs and lows and sunny, through snowy icons. I have taken a good year ,2007, and compared it to the weather last year. I took each month and for every sunny day I give it a point and a partly sunny day I give 1/2 point. I figure the cloudy, rainy and snowy days all count as a zero since it takes sunshine to get my customers to wash. By assigning this value to each year I found my wash days were down in 2009 by 22% for me. That just happens to be almost exactly what my sales for that year were down.
I further compared it to the monthly reports I get for my credit card sales through my automatics. By looking at it monthly I found that 10 of the 12 months of sales each year correlate to the weatherscore for that month.
I am sure that economy has some bearing on sales but weather appears to be a much bigger factor in sales.
I further compared it to the monthly reports I get for my credit card sales through my automatics. By looking at it monthly I found that 10 of the 12 months of sales each year correlate to the weatherscore for that month.
I am sure that economy has some bearing on sales but weather appears to be a much bigger factor in sales.
rph9168
Carwashguy
A good friend of mine owns a car wash chain in the East. He keeps meticulous records of daily sales along with the weather. I recently had a conversation with him about this and he said that in all the years he has been doing this he is convinced that the weather controls his sales far more than the economy.
He did say that he felt last year was a little bit of an exception in that his average sales number was down which he attributes to people purchasing lower priced packages more than they used to.
From the operators and distributors around the country that I have talked to it seems to be the consensus that the weather has not been favorable this year and the economy has adversely affected their numbers more than in past situations where the economy is weak. Personally I think the high unemployment rate coupled with the economy has added to the problem more than it has in the past.
He did say that he felt last year was a little bit of an exception in that his average sales number was down which he attributes to people purchasing lower priced packages more than they used to.
From the operators and distributors around the country that I have talked to it seems to be the consensus that the weather has not been favorable this year and the economy has adversely affected their numbers more than in past situations where the economy is weak. Personally I think the high unemployment rate coupled with the economy has added to the problem more than it has in the past.
cleaning up mud
Member
Ours do better during drought with no rain in site, we had rain and the economy did not help either and now we are getting more rain
