[Taken from a recorded phone interview with Ed Drogmund on August 20th, 2009]

Ed Drogmund has been in the self service industry for thirty-one years and opened his five-bay self service back on September 8th, 1978. The location has been a fixture in the Thousand Oaks community in California for many years. Over the recent years Ed had noticed that being in a cash-only business was not as appealing to his younger customers which led him to add a credit card to token machine of which started to average close to $1500 per month in sales. The problem being this did not really build any loyalty into his customers, but it did address the need for his younger customers to have access to the funds trapped on their credit cards and bank cards.

Owner, Ed Drogmund washes his personal vehicle with his in-house account card whenever he wants and has no bulky coins to carry around.Ed researched new technology every year and eventually talked with the folks from WashCard Systems about their customer loyalty program and credit card in the bay solution. Ed recalls that he was the first person in his area to do anything like this in his area with a self service wash and to this day retains the business of the younger generation. Before he had credit cards and prepaid loyalty cards he was making on average $1500 dollars from his credit card to token machine which told him people want to use their cards. Once he added a card reader on every self service bay and each of his vacuums he was blown away with the customer response within his community. Ed says that he now averages close to $4300 dollars a month in card-based revenue between credit cards and his prepaid loyalty card customers. "People just love using their cards, once they have them their hooked!" says Ed. "I had the system paid for including all of my costs to put it in and everything in about nine to ten months from turning it on, and thats PROFIT that I made above and beyond my normal business the year previous! I have been thrilled at how well it has performed for me and how it's building loyal customers amongst the younger generations. All of the young kids have a bank card and I would say that all of the collage age people use their bank card for everything since they just don't carry cash. I still have a lot of old timers that only use cash, but some of them use their cards now that they are more available. The biggest benefit has been getting more business from the younger crowd."

Ed continues to talk about how the poor economy has effected the wash industry but failed to slow his business down, "As for the economy, it really could have hit me hard but my card business has been slowly building over the past three years and as a temporary promotion I started offering a 25% bonus value on all prepaid funds and when the economy got really bad I decided to just keep that bonus. You know what? My business as increased over time and during the past year I'm posting higher growth even with a lower dollar per ticket overall. My customer loyalty card program has kept me from posting losses this year and due to the growth on that side of my business it allowed me to stay on track with last years numbers which were higher than the year before that."

One of the observations that Ed has made about the customers he talks to is that now that times are tough, a lot of his customers used to get full service washes every month and they ALL used their credit card or reward program to pay for their washes. They come to his self service to save a few bucks and they admit that if Ed's bays didn't accept credit card or offer an incentive program it would have been less appealing to use the self service facility all together. Ed just told me that just this past Saturday he had his best day for card-based income in wash history. Did somebody say there was a recession going on? This goes to show it's more about giving the customer what they want in terms of a product, it's also about letting them pay in the way most convenient to them.