gmerkt
New member
One of if not the strangest for me. Until recently, I had a kind of small business that involved reconditioning and selling second hand vacuum cleaners. I did this for about nine years working out of my home. The advertising was free by way of Craig's List. It was very low overhead; it worked for me as a retirement thing.
I won't say that Craig's List customers tend to be bottom feeders; I got all kinds of calls and many were very nice people. There was a time when I had a delivery option. I charged one dollar a mile, one-way. So if the customer was 10 miles away, the charge was $10. Some people are house-bound or disabled and cannot get out to shop, so this was a good option for some of them. However, it was a real time gobbler so I quit after not offering the service for very long. In small business, I found that you have to try different things from time to time to see what works.
As to delivery, I never wanted to go more than about ten miles maximum. One evening, I got a call from a woman who wanted a Hoover Windtunnel self-propelled 6400 series. She lived about 35 miles away. I didn't really want this business, but she lived only a couple of miles from a rifle range where I'm a member. So I agreed to do the delivery and I incorporated it into a trip to the range. I charged her a flat $20 for the delivery.
How could I ever have anticipated the following? When I arrived at the address the customer gave me, she was in the process of moving into the basement apartment of a private home. She said the carpet was infested with fleas and her plan was to sprinkle diatomaceous earth over the carpet to kill them. The vacuum cleaner would be used to vacuum up the powder. I went through the demonstration of how the vacuum cleaner worked, features, etc. She paid and I left.
And now to one of the many reasons I didn't like relatively distant delivery situations. If there is a problem, it takes longer to deal with it because of the distance. This customer called the next evening; her complaint was that the brush roll of the vacuum cleaner would no longer turn. True to my 30 day sale guarantee, I got into my car and drove 35 miles out to her place.
When I got there, it was utter chaos. It was night time and furniture was outside on the lawn. I got to her apartment and saw the Hoover sitting there. It looked like a ghost machine. I picked it up and it felt very heavy. There was white powder everywhere. I opened up the dust compartment of the vacuum and pulled out the bag which was as full as can be of diatomaceous earth. I up-ended the machine removed the bottom plate. Sure enough, the machine had thrown the flat belt (these have two belts, a flat belt from motor to drive mechanism, and a Vee belt from drive mech. to brush roll).
Here's what this customer had done. Instead of dusting her carpet with a small bag of diatomaceous earth, she'd gone out and bought two 50 pound sacks of the material. Then she had proceeded to dump all 100 pounds of it onto the carpet of the two bedroom apartment. You could look down into the nap of the carpet and see dunes of it. There was no way a consumer-grade plasti-vac was going to be able to tackle the job. Diatomaceous earth is very fine, very much like graphite and for this reason, it hadn't taken long to cause the belt to throw off on the vacuum cleaner. Imagine how many Hoover Y bags it would've taken to pick up all that powder?
Anyway, I explained to her what the problem was and that this vacuum cleaner was never designed for such a task. I gladly refunded her purchase price including delivery charge. I suggested that she rent some kind of commercial machine from Home Depot or get a shop vac.
After this episode, I discontinued all deliveries.
I won't say that Craig's List customers tend to be bottom feeders; I got all kinds of calls and many were very nice people. There was a time when I had a delivery option. I charged one dollar a mile, one-way. So if the customer was 10 miles away, the charge was $10. Some people are house-bound or disabled and cannot get out to shop, so this was a good option for some of them. However, it was a real time gobbler so I quit after not offering the service for very long. In small business, I found that you have to try different things from time to time to see what works.
As to delivery, I never wanted to go more than about ten miles maximum. One evening, I got a call from a woman who wanted a Hoover Windtunnel self-propelled 6400 series. She lived about 35 miles away. I didn't really want this business, but she lived only a couple of miles from a rifle range where I'm a member. So I agreed to do the delivery and I incorporated it into a trip to the range. I charged her a flat $20 for the delivery.
How could I ever have anticipated the following? When I arrived at the address the customer gave me, she was in the process of moving into the basement apartment of a private home. She said the carpet was infested with fleas and her plan was to sprinkle diatomaceous earth over the carpet to kill them. The vacuum cleaner would be used to vacuum up the powder. I went through the demonstration of how the vacuum cleaner worked, features, etc. She paid and I left.
And now to one of the many reasons I didn't like relatively distant delivery situations. If there is a problem, it takes longer to deal with it because of the distance. This customer called the next evening; her complaint was that the brush roll of the vacuum cleaner would no longer turn. True to my 30 day sale guarantee, I got into my car and drove 35 miles out to her place.
When I got there, it was utter chaos. It was night time and furniture was outside on the lawn. I got to her apartment and saw the Hoover sitting there. It looked like a ghost machine. I picked it up and it felt very heavy. There was white powder everywhere. I opened up the dust compartment of the vacuum and pulled out the bag which was as full as can be of diatomaceous earth. I up-ended the machine removed the bottom plate. Sure enough, the machine had thrown the flat belt (these have two belts, a flat belt from motor to drive mechanism, and a Vee belt from drive mech. to brush roll).
Here's what this customer had done. Instead of dusting her carpet with a small bag of diatomaceous earth, she'd gone out and bought two 50 pound sacks of the material. Then she had proceeded to dump all 100 pounds of it onto the carpet of the two bedroom apartment. You could look down into the nap of the carpet and see dunes of it. There was no way a consumer-grade plasti-vac was going to be able to tackle the job. Diatomaceous earth is very fine, very much like graphite and for this reason, it hadn't taken long to cause the belt to throw off on the vacuum cleaner. Imagine how many Hoover Y bags it would've taken to pick up all that powder?
Anyway, I explained to her what the problem was and that this vacuum cleaner was never designed for such a task. I gladly refunded her purchase price including delivery charge. I suggested that she rent some kind of commercial machine from Home Depot or get a shop vac.
After this episode, I discontinued all deliveries.
