Wednesday, April 24, 2024

Change Price on Older Speed Queen and Huebsch Washers



 If you have older Speed Queen or Huebsch washers below is a link to a 3 minute video on how to do it:

https://youtu.be/I6TjbvuCm20?si=OgisqPBZ71lBCIjj

Ev 

A Heck of A Nice Guy

Wednesday, April 17, 2024

Program Price and Top Off Minutes Huebsch Galaxy 600 Dryer

 


Below is a short 2.5 minute video showing how you can change the price and top off minutes on a Huebsch Galaxy 600 dryer. Speed Queen and other brands made by Alliance are similar.
Ev
A Heck of A Nice Guy



Wednesday, April 10, 2024

PayRange Opinion Interview

 


One of the two questions I get all the time in my current position is "what should I be doing about a cashless system." I’ve decided to ask other owners for their opinions as part of my blog series. Here is another opinion. This one is about PayRange from a gentleman by the name of Justin who recently sold a store that he had.

How long did you own your store?
10 years.

When did you decide to add a cashless system?

I started looking at cash systems in 2018 and I decided in 2019 to go with PayRange.

What made you start looking at the cashless system?

I had a lot of large machines and I was always having to put money into my changer. At least once a month I’d have to dump in $500 or $1000 into the changer. It was just a nature of the strip mall I was in that a lot of people came to get quarters from the businesses as well as from the apartments around me. 
Plus more and more things in the world were becoming card based so I wanted to do something with that. I wanted to be one of the first laundromats in the area to have a cashless system rather than play catch up to my competition. I also wanted to differentiate myself from the competition.

What made you decide on Payrange?
Two things. The cost was really really low. At the time they had a deal where you could get readers and the price was really low, something like $25 per machine. I don’t remember exactly how much, but then if someone used the machine you got that money back, so I essentially paid almost nothing to have my whole store equipped with a cashless option. The second reason was they kept claiming it was very easy to install and that I would not need to pay someone to install it.  I was very skeptical at first about that. When they sent over their instructions, it was very easy. It was not perfect. There were a few machines that were not exactly the way that they said they were in the instructions. I found out later that was because they had a different version of the computer board and what was normally put in those machines. That was partly to my replacing boards as well as different boards being done by the manufacturer when they did an upgrade on that model machine.

What did you enjoy about PayRange?
It came in very handy during Covid. I had people that were not interested in dropping eight dollars worth of quarters into a machine. So I noticed that that was when my PayRange results started to go up. Before then I had maybe 5% of my customers.  After Covid it was more like 20%. More importantly I did not have to go to the bank as often. I noticed that instead of filling up my change machines every month by getting extra quarters it was every 6 to 7 weeks. That doesn’t sound like much but that eliminated five or six trips to the bank for quarters every year, plus the time of unwrapping quarters.

What are the advantages of going with PayRange versus other systems, and what other systems did you look at before deciding on PayRange?
I did not look at any other systems in depth. I knew of several of them and had gone to different stores to look at them.  The price per machine was what appeal to me about PayRange.

Did you encounter any problems installing it or when the devices were running?
For the most part everything went in great. There was a couple of little things that I found out through trial and error. The first one is that you have to make sure the settings on the reader are correct. 
The second is that there are some manufactures that have different models even though they look the same they’re not 100%, the same and so a reader for one machine might have to be set up slightly different than a reader for another machine even though it’s the same model they could be different series or made at different times, or have a different control board, When I discovered that I could contact the support team via email, they usually had an answer for me in a day or two.

People ask about the float. The float is the amount of money that a person has on the app or on a card that may have not spent at your store yet. Some systems give the owner the complete control and access to the float and others do not. PayRange is one that does not. Did that bother you?
Never thought about it that much because I was more concerned about making sure I was able to provide an option for people. In retrospect, it’s nice that I had access to just the money that they spent at my store. If there was ever a problem with things that they put on PayRange app, I did not have to deal with  that. The customer would have to go to PayRange and that made my life more easy.

PayRange has a number of different hardware options now. Did you look at any of those?

At the time I had my store, Payrange only had readers for the machines they didn’t have anything else.



Did you have to do anything special to get people to use the app?
I did try several of the pre-built promotions that PayRange has in their system. I did things like people got a free start on a washer or dryer if they downloaded the app, and I also did some of their rewards programs. One was if people spent a certain amount of money in my store, they would get a certain amount of money on a coupon that they could use  at a different time. 

What was the total adoption rate of people that used the app?
I got it up to about 15%. There were probably things I could have done more to promote it.
I did not have a ton of big banners or posters and I mostly just talked about it through word-of-mouth and some small signs. If I were still the owner of that laundromat, I would have a lot more promotion materials for it than what I did.

Did you attract any new customers because of having PayRange?
I did have quite a few people that once they found out about it liked it. A number of my regular customers that were only using quarters converted over to it, including a lot more older people than I thought. I had some people that were used to using apps. They switched over to it as well. At the time if I promoted it more on outside things like mailings or internet ads, I probably would’ve had a few more.

You’ve mentioned a couple times about promotions, do you recommend that anyone putting in a cashless system promote their new system and how do you suggest they do it?

You definitely have to incentivize people at first to use the app. People are so conditioned to spending quarters that they will, naturally just think to do that. How you want to incentivize people to use the system I think depends a little bit on where you’re located. 

If you had to do it again, would you use PayRange, try more options that they have out there, or go with a different system entirely?
I was fine with PayRange. If they had other things to try, I might look at them.

Thanks to Justin for his candor.
I have asked others to comment on their payment systems.
If they send them to me I will publish their opinion on their system.
I hope this helps in your decision making about what system to go with.

Ev
A Heck of A Nice Guy




Wednesday, April 3, 2024

ESD Card Readers Opinion Interview


 
One of the two main questions I have been getting asked throughout my career in laundry equipment sales is: what is the best card reader to put on your machines.  

I’m happy to give my opinion on the different systems that I have had experience with either at my own stores or through ones that I managed. I also thought though since the company I work for, does not represent one particular brand that I can be as independent as possible in my opinions.
Then I had a fun idea, why not let you my fellow laundromat owners provide your thoughts on what you think the best system is. I used to be a journalist so I’ve decided to interview owners about their experiences with the different card systems out there.
I have emailed a few owners with questions on the cashless system they are using and I'll publish them here as I receive them. Since the owners are writing their own responses, I'm not editing them except to correct for spelling or delete swear words. I'm giving the owners the option of using their real names and locations or being anonymous.
Below is the first of these interviews:

The first person I’m talking to is a gentleman by the name of Mike F. who has a 1,500sq/ft store and he has ESD card readers.

So what made you decide to go with a non-cash payment system?
I started looking into this as soon as Wisconsin said, it would be legal to do on Laundry machines. I had seen that people were spending more and more with their credit cards and not carrying cash in other stores and I wanted to be at the forefront of this movement.

Were you having a problem keeping quarters in your store?
No. My store is generally been quarter positive. I’ve only had to buy quarters for my store once in the 15 years that I’ve owned it. I’ve been fortunate that way.

What were your concerns about cashless systems in general?
-How long before I would get my money back
-Cost
-Would my customers like it and use it

What system did you go with and why ?
At the time that I started looking at systems in 2016, there were generally only three. There was ESD, SpyderWash, and FasCard. When I started looking at the prices for all of them, they were all roughly $500 per machine. At the time two of the companies had a minimum amount that you needed to buy in order for them to sell to you. One of them it was a minimum of $10,000 and the other it was a minimum of a certain number of machines, I think 20 machines.  My store is not that big and my pockets are not that deep so I did not want to commit a whole ton of money on something that I wasn’t sure would work. At the time paying by phone was very new and the technology of apps wasn't popular yet.
I figured the technology would keep changing so I decided to go with the most simple method as I figured it would be a while before people stopped using physical credit cards and everyone knows how to swipe a card.

What did you like best about the ESD card readers?
The ESD card reader is a simple swipe device. Very simple. Everybody knows how to swipe a credit card. That’s what turned me onto that particular product. I know since then they have added other things, however  I have just stayed with the card swipes because it’s what my customers understand and I have the least amount of problems with. 

What was the cost for the card readers?
About $500 each and that was just the readers, it was a little bit more for Install at the time. There are the percentages taken off for the transactions which is between 3.5%-5% depending on what kind of card they have. There is also a monthly fee for maintaining the stats website.

How long did it take for you to get a return on your investment?
I spent about $10,000 total on the equipment and install. When I look back as much as I promoted it, if I were to just take the amount of revenue that I earned from those credit card readers only it would’ve taken me 3 1/2 years to pay it all back.

What I noticed was that about 10% of my customers gravitated to it right away. They appreciated not having to use a lot of quarters. I think in my store, because I do not have a lot of big machines, or at least didn’t at that time, that a lot of people did not find it trouble to carry around a dollar or two of quarters.  Where I found it most helpful was in two situations:
-those people that had garbage bags full of clothes they liked having the card system, because they did not have to carry a bunch of quarters,
-and the people that maybe did not quite figure out how many loads they had, and discovered that they ran short of change they could use the card reader to still start machines. Some people decided that because we had a card reader, they would bring more than just their ordinary amount of clothes they might bring a comforter or blanket, and they knew they could use the credit card to start the machine.

Were there any advantages of this system over the other others at the time that you installed it?
Our swipe is very simple. There were smart phones around, but they were not as prevalent as they are today. You never knew what was going to be the exact standard for things like iPay or Google pay at that time so I went with the easiest thing for people to understand.  Also I figured it would have the least amount of maintenance.

Were there any other extras that came along with the readers?
The website that had all the data was very interesting to keep track of the time and the amount spent. I looked at it a lot at first and then didn’t really look at it for months afterwards. Ironically, I ran a five year comparison on the data just recently and all of the spending habits all still matched up in terms of when people are using credit cards at my store. It has not changed in five years. I thought that was very interesting.

Were there any problems with the readers?
They generally worked just fine however, there were two parts that you really needed to make sure you kept up on.
-The first was making sure that the antenna that broadcast the signal from the machine to your Wi-Fi was always in a clear area. Sometimes if workers went behind the machine to do maintenance, they might takeoff a back panel or move something and they would forget about that antenna and either not put it back where it needed to go or the leads would come out of the machine. That made the credit card swipe not work.

-The second and most important bid of maintenance was keeping up with the software updates that ESD would send. 
When you ordered your card readers, you had the choice of getting a router that ESD sold you and that would connect to your card devices or you could hook it up to your own  internet system. Since my internet system is a closed loop that is not open to customers I decided to just use that. What they did not tell me was that if you went with the ESD router you would automatically get all the security updates sent to you on the router and taking care of you didn’t have to do anything. If you used your own internet router, they would mail you the security updates. It was a series of credit card looking cards that you would have to open up the washer or dryer and physically insert into the computer board inside the machine. It would then give you certain readings, and that would update the software. You had to do that manually for each washer and dryer and that took a lot of time to do.  If you missed an update, your credit card devices were still secure, however eventually you ran into the problem where the swipe devices would not talk to the servers that ESD had because they were too far out of date. At that point there was nothing that you can do except for by new card readers.  Now that they have gone to the app kiosk I’m not sure if it still works that way, but a few years ago that’s the way it was.

Are they easy to install?
For people that understand electronics and wiring they probably are. I don’t know how to do any of that stuff so I did not do it. I know that they hook into a small computer board that is placed inside the machine, and that is connected to power as well as to the coin drop and to the control board. I would not want to do it myself just in case I screw something up but I’m sure it’s a lot easier now and they have better directions than back then.

Have you ever considered adding ESD‘s other products like a kiosk or their mobile payment app?
I have looked at all of those. However, I’ve decided that I’m going to stick with something simple that everyone understands and still today not everyone has a smart phone or likes having a ton of apps on their phone so I’m staying with just a credit card readers for now.

Thank you for the interview!

Ev
A Heck of A Nice Guy