you guys are too much..I thought you were businessmen?
you know what the unit cost is for a gallon of water these days?
Not 'zackly, but was there some sharp rise around the time showers went from predominantly $5 to when they doubled? Not that I recall. And lots of truckstops use well water, so they're paying for the pump electricity, but not the water itself.
the cost to heat that water? the maintenance of the heaters and plumbing?
The cost of them towels and the cost to launder them? [/QUOTE]
There's an initial outlay for the towels, of course, but they're purchased in bulk at HQ, hundreds or thousands at a time, and reused, especially at Pilot, until they're the consistency of burlap. So after the initial outlay, they get a LOT of use out of them. And again, can you remember a general price spike in all these that would cause the cost of a shower to double?
then the labor to clean and general upkeep?
if a cleaner was to clean to somes exacting standards and it took 15 minutes for a stall at 8 bucks an hour that is $2 in labour alone...
Well, yeah, but they aren't anything close to exacting standards. They don't spend close to 15 minutes per stall. More like 5, and sometimes not even that. Sometimes it's just a quick mop-out.
And most importantly, we don't have labour down here. Is there a labour/labor exchange rate?
...
get real gentlemen..it is a user pay world out there...there is no free ride anymore..besides showers are a tax deduction...
I understand that. In fact, if I stop somewhere to use the bathroom, like a fast food place or a gas station, I usually look for something small to purchase, at least a drink on the way out or something. But it seems that, like diesel, the cost increase isn't really reflective of the actual costs that make it up. The sum
is greater than the total of its parts; there's some cost shifting going on.
It's not that I want to dictate how a businessman wants to set his prices, but it's like when I was selling steaks for a living: the company told us to keep selling. Some salesman didn't want to offend the customer by pushing more products on them. But the company said, "You know when it's enough? When the customer TELLS you that's enough."
So there are only two ways for us to tell the truckstops that the price for a shower is enough (or too much, in this case). One is to stop showering, which isn't feasible. The other is to tell them, "Enough!" which is what I'm doing.
