We are currently living through a period of rapid change, with historically high levels of inflation. According to the Reserve bank of Australia, the Australian CPI has almost doubled over the last year (June 2021 = 3.8, June 2022 = 6.1), indicating significant inflation and cost increases. But what does this mean for your machines? If you've been thinking about raising your prices, now might be a good time to act. And if you haven't been thinking about it, you should consider doing so as your costs will certainly be increasing.
So how should you increase your prices?
Increasing your wash and dry prices can be easy or hard depending on your machines, location, and type of payment system.
Coin vs Cashless:
Cashless payment machines are by far the most flexible when it comes to influencing prices. You have total control over your pricing (it's easy to charge $1.25).
Coin on the other hand is far more rigid. Your prices really are limited to $1 increments, otherwise issuing coins becomes vastly more complicated. Changing a coin price is harder than cashless, as it often involves adjusting it manually in each machine.
Tokens: the flexibility of tokens isn't too different from coin in reality. You might think you can simply make each token more expensive by a small amount, but customers will find it confusing and frustrating to calculate how much each wash costs them... eg 4 tokens at $1:15 per token takes effort to figure out vs a cashless system that simply says "$4:60 per wash". You will lose customers who you confuse!
Coin Slide vs Coin Drop:
Coin slide pricing mechanisms are often only changeable in 0.20c increments, however, often customers don't have many 0.20c coins. Your regular customers might adjust, but new customers are unlikely to bother with a complicated selection of coins they must carry. With a coin change machine onsite operators generally stick with one denomination (otherwise managing coin stock levels becomes much more complicated). So coin slides have minimal flexibility.
Coin drops have similar problems but to a lesser extent. Depending on the model, some can change prices in smaller increments, or take a wider range of coins. You can still run into the same problem of customers not having the right coins, but it is less likely.
When and how:
This largely depends on your costs and the last time you increased prices. If you recently increased prices then another increase will possibly alienate some of your customers. However, you do need to ensure your costs are being covered.
if you do not increase your prices with inflation, you are actually losing revenue each year!
Price signage costs
Don't let the cost of price signage put you off changing prices. The cost is tiny compared to the revenue you would gain. For example - if you run 5000 cycles each month - then a $0.20 increase per cycle provides over $900 (before GST) extra profit each month. The cost of changing your price signs and stickers would be covered in a matter of weeks.
Your consideration should be based on what is reasonable. ie what is reasonable for customers to pay and what financial return is reasonable for the time, energy and risk you invest in your vended operation.
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