I have recently seen a change at a few washes going from a truly unlimited monthly program (wash every day) to a limited style program such as (get 8 washes a month for X monthly amount). I for one have seen lines of vehicles stacked up at these washes that don't need to wash their vehicle and now that this change up has occurred those lines have started to decrease. With the cost of supplies going up do you think more washes will start to convert to this limited style or not.
Keep in mind, I do not have personal experience in this area because I do not offer these plans, but here are my thoughts.
Truly unlimited can be a Pandora’s Box for the very reason you have cited above. I can see how it can be very detrimental to an IBA that only can was 12 cars an hour to begin with.
My question would be - have they lowered the price of the monthly plan now that it is only good for 8 washes rather than 30 or 31?(most plans I see do say limit one Wash per day).
The other potential problem could be the people who do not track how many washes they have used and drive up expecting a gate to rise and it doesn’t because they already used their limit. Probably would result in angry customers. That would be if you had the RFID type stickers, and the plan expired for the month. It seems like you would have to have some program that people could track their usage on their phone if you are limiting to 8 or whatever, so they are not driving in blindly. This may very well already exist - I’m just not up on the current plan technologies.
Tough situation- two fairly large chains around me are getting bought up by bigger multi- state operations. I know of two separate washes with 20-30 locations each that have both sold out to even larger National/multi state chains. We might be moving in the direction of needing to have an extremely large presence in order for this model to have truly long-term sustainability.
