Reinvent Your Lobby
Stock the items that sell

Let’s say everything at your carwash is nearly perfect. The latest top brush cleans great, the new low-pH chemicals are leaving the cars brighter and shinier and the employees come to work every morning. With those key parts of the business in place, how about taking some time to reinvent your lobby and transform it into a retail showpiece?

Think of your lobby as an income center. It can be a profit source, just like a lube and detail center, and it’s a business to take seriously. If your goal is just $1 in sales per car and you’re washing 80,000 cars a year, you’re selling $80,000 in retail products. That translates into $40,000 in profit.

It takes very little effort and investment to achieve that goal. For a few thousand dollars, you can have a completely stocked store. The more space you devote to your store, the better your chances to get to $1 or more in sales per car.

Think like a retailer Convince your customers that your carwash is a retailer. Every square foot of your lobby can be profitable. Keeping the shelves well stocked encourages customers to shop and look. An empty store makes it seem like you’re going out of business or that the remaining products are no good.

To keep stocked up, purchase products weekly or bi-weekly. If you will not be doing the ordering yourself, select a specific person to do the job and make sure it is done at a specific time, such as every Monday, for example.

Buying inventory is easy, but selecting the right products to fill your store shelves poses another challenge. It’s important to purchase merchandise based on what sells, not on personal preferences. For the best advice on what really sells in the stores, ask the experts—the distributors who sell to carwashes. A few distributors will even guarantee sales. If the merchandise doesn’t sell, it can be returned to the distributor.

In order to reinvent your store, you’ll need to make sure you have seven basic product categories:

• Air fresheners
• Automotive accessories
• Retail and automotive chemicals
• Carpet and rubber floor mats
• Greeting cards
• Snack foods
• Non-automotive impulse products.

Profits on these product categories are huge. Markups allow a minimum of 50 percent gross profit, which means you double your money. To work at this margin, it is important to purchase right and deal with suppliers that specialize in the carwash market. When it comes to purchasing, think of the old saying, “Goods well purchased are like goods half sold.”

Air fresheners are winners, so allocate a good amount of space for them. It’s worth noting that 54 percent of all paper air fresheners sold are Car Freshner Little Trees.

However, many other manufacturers produce quality paper, novelty and licensed air fresheners. When choosing them, make sure you do some research and talk to your distributor before making a large purchase.

Automotive accessories are a huge category with a vast number of product choices. Make sure your shelves are stocked with old staples like the magnetic hide-a-key and the two-inch blind-spot mirror, but also experiment with some of the new products, like CD visor holders, sunglass holders and automotive cell-phone holders. Experimenting with new products keeps your store exciting and fresh.

One new automotive category deserves special mention—automotive wipes. Start stocking up, because they’re good and they really sell. There are wipes now for everything from glass and leather to rims and wheels, so there’s something to appeal to everyone.

Some operators are reluctant to stock retail automotive chemicals such as express wax, tire dressings or liquid wax because they’re afraid people won’t use their services anymore.

While you probably wouldn’t want to sell carwash soap, people are going to buy what they’re going to buy. If a customer really wants to wax his car, he is either going to buy the wax from you or from the competitor down the street. Why not be your own competition and keep the profit? Stock a mix of carpet cleaners, all-purpose cleaners, leather car products, brake-dust removers and vinyl protectants in your store.

While it’s a good idea to carry retail chemicals, stick with those companies that have a brand-name following. Don’t spend your time and money trying to teach people that there’s a better product, one that you prefer. Just sell them what they buy.

Carpet and rubber floor mats really bring extra dollars to the bottom line. Operators can profit around $20 for a set of mats. Try to give customers a choice of both low and high-end solutions, since floor mats only have a life expectancy of about a year, and everyone’s budget is different. If customers feel they’ve gotten a good deal from you, chances are they’ll be back next year for another set of mats.

Greeting cards also offer a tremendous impulse-buying opportunity. The greeting card industry has annual sales of $7.5 billion, and the average household purchases 35 individual cards a year. Your carwash can carry cards for every occasion, relationship and ethnicity. Look for a company that specializes in greeting cards. These companies can tell you what cards sell best.

Snack foods are a natural for any lobby. People are always in a rush. If they come to the carwash at lunchtime, they will miss lunch that day. Many customers enjoy a quick soda and a candy bar, and they’ll be glad they don’t have to make another stop to pick up a snack.

Novelty and licensed products do well because they have strong brand recognition. The selection of non-automotive products should vary by your customer base. For instance, in states that have hands-free cellphone laws, hands-free kits are a great choice. Other cell-phone accessories, such as cellphone chargers, are also popular items. CD holders are strong sellers, and any patriotic item is especially popular.

Customers & competitors

People won’t buy your products if they aren’t geared to their lifestyles. Look at your customers. If you have a lot of families coming in, choose the Sponge Bob products rather than the X-rated air fresheners. Try to make your lobby a family-oriented place, with an emphasis on fun novelty items. With a strong customer base of families, you might want to stock die-cast toy cars that retail for about $2.99 to $3.99. Children love them, and it’s hard for parents to say no to their kids on affordable products like these.

Once you pinpoint your customer base, you need to find out who your competition is. The power retailers like Wal-Mart, Home Depot and Auto Zone are not our competition. However, we need to learn from them. Our stores are completely different than the big-box retailers. We offer convenience like those stores, but we need to reinvent ourselves by offering selection. These huge retailers offer competing brands of products, so customers can pick the products they want. Operators can use this same theory by offering choices.

These huge retailers maintain their inventory on a regular basis. Wal-Mart sells more air fresheners than anyone else in the world, and they never run out of stock. That means carwashes need to offer customers plenty of choices.

Arranging merchandise

Once you’ve ordered the merchandise, you’ll need to arrange it in an appealing manner. Placing floor displays around the lobby guarantees that customers will notice hot products, and this arrangement can increase sales volume by as much as 50 percent. Floor displays are good merchandising tools, but don’t expect them to last forever. Since they are only effective for a few months, you’ll need to plan ahead and decide where that merchandise will go after a few weeks.

Good store flow is also critical. Don’t have things so crowded that customers can’t get through the aisles. Group similar products together, and place merchandise where it’s easy to reach, not too high or too low.

The space around the register is the highest traffic area, so it creates the best exposure for the most profitable products. Therefore, it’s a good idea to place items with the highest profit close to the register.

Finally, don’t price yourself out of business, but also make sure you don’t overcharge for products. Once people realize they can get a product down the street for a lot less, many of them won’t purchase the product from you again. Some might even resent your carwash for charging inflated prices for products.

If you want your carwash lobby to go above and beyond the average, make sure you follow the guidelines mentioned. Find a good supplier, buy small orders on a weekly basis, select items that appeal to your individual customer base, create a good store flow, have attractive floor displays and offer quality items at fair prices. It may seem like quite a tall order, but it’s well worth the effort.

Eric Wachtel is vice president of T & E Sales in Metuchen, N.J. He can be e-mailed at emwachtel@aol.com.

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