WCA Self Serve Panel Discussion, Part II The second half of the 2017 Self Serve Panel Discussion, hosted and facilitated by the Western Carwash Association during Car Wash Show 2017 in Las Vegas this past April.
Holding on too tight ...
Are the pending/holding charges on credit card sales losing you customers? KRISTY: That kind of leads me to my next question here: If using credit cards in your bays, what’s the maximum pending charge? And are you using credit card processing on any other equipment besides the bays, and if so, what? JERRY: We use credit cards and our maximum is $12. We do get phone calls -- people say, I only spent $4, and it shows $12. And we now have the signs like the gas stations do, at our bays. It seems to cut down on the amount of phone calls. But credit cards are phenomenal. It’s a great money maker. Even if you charge $2 or $3, they’re not rushing. When it comes to cash, people don’t want to spend a lot of cash. But credit cards -- it’s like no cost, in a sense. TERRY: As long as you let everybody know -- if you put up the sign up like Jerry said, “You will see a temporary or pending charge on your account.” That will diffuse a lot of the questions that come about. Yeah, credit card use is -- if you’ve got a $2 price point, you’ll find that most people are giving you $5.50 almost $6 on average. It’s much better for the younger generation, too. They don’t carry cash -- you have to take credit cards. MARK: I agree completely. We take credit cards everywhere -- at our vacuums, dog washes, and at all our washes and in all our bays. We get a few calls. We had one woman, she came in or her husband did, and she said we’ve got 7 pending charges for $10 on our credit card. So I had to explain to her that she needed to give it 24-48 hours, and then come back. We’ve had more problem with the debit cards, because it holds those funds, so if some-
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• SUMMER 2017 •
WCA’s Self Serve Panel Discussion with Executive Director Kristy Babb, Terry McDonald and WCA Board Members Sydney King, Larry Nelson and Mark Mikesell!
body’s low on money -- only $70 in their account -- they can’t go buy a candy bar because it’s taken their money. Or, well, holding their money -- not taking it -- but still. SYDNEY: I was talking to another self serve operator the other day who was explaining to me -- we both happen to use WashGear -- and he said there is a programming capability that will let your system settle every single transaction so that that won’t happen. He said it ended up costing him maybe another 60 cents per transaction, but he said that to him it’s worth not getting these phone calls over it. So there is that capability if you find that it’s an annoyance to your customers and they’re not coming back to you because they see that $10 or $12 charge and they don’t check back to see that it’s gone. I’m one of those terrible people that doesn’t
look at their credit card until I get a statement and these people who are just online and checking their accounts all the time are mind boggling to me. But you do have that capability with some of the software companies. I would check to see if it’s an issue for you. I have not made that choice because I have the signage. That was one of the first things I did when I put the credit cards in. KRISTY: Do different credit card companies provide that signage? SYDNEY: I had to make my own signs. AUDIENCE: Are you all counting up at your bays? LARRY: See, the way we do it is we do a $6 swipe. Just a flat six bucks. We do $2.50 to start for 3.5 minutes and then $6 gives them like 7.5 minutes or whatever. If it’s a big rig or a motor home, they just {continued }