I did my good deed for the day today
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Today I went to the car wash to get the salt and ice off my car. It's just one of those little automatic car wash places where you drive up park the car and it hoses the car down with lots of flashing lights (always go for the basic wash, don't get ripped off with the other stuff, hot wax my arse). So nothing fancy, but the cheapest option gets rid of the salt.
Anyway, today the car wash folks were trying something a little different, they were offering to wash the wheels and rims by hand for $1. A couple of thoughts went through my head when the guy said it would cost a dollar, my first was this guy is trying to pull a fast one and his manager doesn't know he's doing this (I worked in a car wash for a couple of years, so I know some of these scams), secondly I thought, a dollar, how good could it be for a dollar?
I'd watched the guy approach the six cars in front of me and none of them had taken him up on his offer so I decided to speak to him about it.
It turns out he'd been making the offer to every car for about 2 hours, and so far had managed to sell 5 hand washes. I explained to him the reasons I thought he had undervalued his service and that the perceived value for the service was too low and therefore I believed people would be reluctant to take him up on his offer. I suggested he double the price to 2 bucks and see what happens, the worst that could happen is someone says, ooh 2 bucks is too much and he can give them a special offer price of 1 dollar. He felt a bit nervous as his manager had told him to do the offer for a buck but decided to try it out. There were 5 cars behind me and he made the 2 buck offer to each of them, he came back pretty happy, with 4 out of the 5 taking him up on his 2 buck offer.
Today I went to the car wash to get the salt and ice off my car. It's just one of those little automatic car wash places where you drive up park the car and it hoses the car down with lots of flashing lights (always go for the basic wash, don't get ripped off with the other stuff, hot wax my arse). So nothing fancy, but the cheapest option gets rid of the salt.
Anyway, today the car wash folks were trying something a little different, they were offering to wash the wheels and rims by hand for $1. A couple of thoughts went through my head when the guy said it would cost a dollar, my first was this guy is trying to pull a fast one and his manager doesn't know he's doing this (I worked in a car wash for a couple of years, so I know some of these scams), secondly I thought, a dollar, how good could it be for a dollar?
I'd watched the guy approach the six cars in front of me and none of them had taken him up on his offer so I decided to speak to him about it.
It turns out he'd been making the offer to every car for about 2 hours, and so far had managed to sell 5 hand washes. I explained to him the reasons I thought he had undervalued his service and that the perceived value for the service was too low and therefore I believed people would be reluctant to take him up on his offer. I suggested he double the price to 2 bucks and see what happens, the worst that could happen is someone says, ooh 2 bucks is too much and he can give them a special offer price of 1 dollar. He felt a bit nervous as his manager had told him to do the offer for a buck but decided to try it out. There were 5 cars behind me and he made the 2 buck offer to each of them, he came back pretty happy, with 4 out of the 5 taking him up on his 2 buck offer.
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Posted by Clay Goforth At 12:25:58 PM On 02/19/2007 | - Website - |