Hunter Schenewark@HSchenewark
1. Most of the people who rent these tables are doing it for yard sales. Second most common reason is for birthday parties.
2. We've only had one customer return the tables later than expected. She rented several for a bachelorette party, and ended up losing her thumb riding a mechanical bull. Gnarly. She kept in contact with us during the 2 or 3 weeks it took for her to bring them back. Her friend eventually returned them. We didn't charge her extra and were much more worried about her than the tables.
3. 90% of people pick it up from our porch and drop if off. Occasionally we'll do drop off and pick up. We'll usually charge $10 extra for that. We've never had tables stolen by customers or off our porch. We had some returned when we were out of town and when we returned two weeks later, they were still there.
4. The rentals are overwhelmingly for the weekend. What this means is that a lot of people hold onto them for a week. We don't need them back Monday morning, so if they drop them off on Wednesday, that's great.
5. There's no paperwork, this is a low-stakes, high-trust arrangement.
6. Most people rent multiple. More people rent 4 than 1. If you only need one table, than you'll buy one or make do without it. I also wouldn't want to do this for $15/interaction. When the average ticket if $40-60, that makes it more worthwhile.
6. We wipe the tables off but we've never had one returned dirty. Some come back dusty from the yard sales but that's it.
7. There's better ways to make money. I run my own company, so I understand the basics of business. However, I still think this is one of the easiest. You could scale with chairs and set-up and take-down or adding other options, but I'm not interested in that. The money pays for date night and we've met great people which is nice. That's all we want to get out of it.
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