This afternoon I popped into the local printing shop up the road to order a new batch of business cards and whilst I was doing that decided to drop the car off at the car wash. This business based at our very local shopping center 2 minutes up the road has been operational for a good 10 years and must be one of the success stories. Car washed tend to come and go yet this crowd has gone from strength to strength which shows you business location for a service provider is the key. Once you find the right spot you can literally print money.
The wash and wax plus an inside vacuum with a tyre polish costs R170 or $10 so they are not shafting you and I feel it is well worth the 30 minutes they spend cleaning. It always costs slightly more as I tend to tip the two staff members which from watching today not many do.
What caught my eye and the reason for this post was the business is actually cash less with the business office not having a cash register. They have this machine instead if you are looking to pay with cash. You feed the notes in and it will give you the exact change so it is like a lock safe that staff cannot get into.
I asked a few questions regarding the machine and whether they had experienced an armed robbery because I had not seen one of these machines before. This sits on their counter and I guess for the owners they know the money is safe and that there are no sticky fingers with every transaction being done by a bank card machine or by this automated money machine.
At least the paying by cash is still an option and seeing this machine gives me hope that maybe others who are considering getting rid of the cash would possibly experiment with one of these machines first.
I know over the weekends this car wash is very busy and I would guess by the number of bays could turn over 20 cars an hour which if their clientele was paying in cash would be a prime business to rob come 5pm. In South Africa we tend to think quite differently as the risk of crime is always not far away and you have to be one step ahead. I would presume this is emptied every evening and refilled with small notes in the morning before the shift opens up or there would be a machine missing over night. A lasso over the top of this machine with a metal cable tied to a vehicle and this machine is gone so I would not stake my life on this saying this is a safe option, but it is still a safer option than a cash till.
Lately I have stopped carrying cash so much so the car guards who are an extra security hired by the various shopping precincts have been missing out. I mentioned to one of them that I had no coins and the only change I had was Dubai Dirhams which was the truth. He offered me a solution using a banking app which I thought was quite ingenious of him, but declined. Many of these low end jobs like the petrol station fillers that rely on cash tips for the extras must be feeling the pinch and need to come up with other payment solutions. Cash is disappearing faster than we might think with the ATM's having their weekly restrictions in place on how much cash you can draw.