Anyone tried self service “on your honor” firewood?

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SamT1

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so my family has a place at a lake camp. I sell quite a bit of wood out there and all the regular folks there know me. I live 15 min away. I have a pickup bed trailer I’m thinking of putting 1/2 a cord in and welding a sturdy home built lock box on the bumper. Get my wife to cut some vinyl with a fee schedule for say an arm full or a whole row. Price it reasonable and just hope folks put money or a check in. Worse I’d be out is 1/2 cord.
 
My neighbor does self-serve firewood. He runs a mill and just puts the scraps (mostly slab wood cut into 16”) down by the road. There is a cash box, some empty boxes from the grocery store and it is help yourself. I think he gets $5 for a box, $10 for a trunk and $50 for a pickup bed. He has been doing it for years so it must work. He also sells wheels of slabs.
 
I’m glad to hear of success. Do y’all think if I built a holder that’s 1 foot square and wood length 18” and charged $5 per “bundle” that would be a fair price for convenience. Should be enough for a good steak grill or burgers easy. Maybe 6 of them or 20 if someone wants a camp fire.
 
SamT1, this is a trailer I built for where my son works. It's the same on both sides. Has 48 bins about 12"x 12", it takes the old guy about an hour to fill it with slab wood. Some bins have small pieces for starting fires. They also sell some decent sized body wood when they have it. The bins are sloped so that they can just haul it to the slab pile, fill the bins and then haul it back out front by the highway. They work on the honour system but it's also a Harley repair shop so they don't get ripped very often. It's just an old camper frame and some 2x 10 or 12" boards. It works very well, they have a tarp to cover the top to keep wood semi dry. I just remembered I think the bins might be a 2x10 and a 2x4 so about 13" wide.
IMG_20170210_161651.jpg
 
At a campsite I worked for a summer. A guy had basically a large outside dog kennel and one wall was bins/cubbies similar to the trailer pictured above. I think they were 2’ square and he sold them for $10 a cubby full. The kennel was full and the bins were open through the back fo he could fill them from inside the kennel. He came every Thursday to make sure it was full for the weekend.
 
SamT1

What part of Texas are you in? We do a little of $200K in State Park firewood self service sales a year......We are as far north as Lake Arrowhead, as far south as Corpus Christi, As far east as Martin Creek and as far wast as Abilene but mostly concentrated in the DFW area. even inside a state park the average self serve/honor box shrinkage rate (theft) runs about 22%....and the darker it gets at night the less honest people seem to get. We went into a very large park because someone cut the locks on 3 honor boxes and made off with about $2000....now they don't have to worry about it......Just consider those issues when you price your wood.
 
SamT1

What part of Texas are you in? We do a little of $200K in State Park firewood self service sales a year......We are as far north as Lake Arrowhead, as far south as Corpus Christi, As far east as Martin Creek and as far wast as Abilene but mostly concentrated in the DFW area. even inside a state park the average self serve/honor box shrinkage rate (theft) runs about 22%....and the darker it gets at night the less honest people seem to get. We went into a very large park because someone cut the locks on 3 honor boxes and made off with about $2000....now they don't have to worry about it......Just consider those issues when you price your wood.
I’m north of Abilene 45 min. $5 a square would be almost double the going rate around here. I do have a guard light I could park under and leave on. Yea I think I can make a cash box that would take quite a ruckus to get into. Maybe put the PayPal address on there too to give folks options. Our lake camp is kinda like a little community, not that crime isn’t there occasionally, but most the folks there are regulars.
I wouldn’t be opposed to doing it at some other small lake camps. Trying to do things to keep cash flow up in the off season besides selling BBQ joints wood way too cheap.
 
I’m north of Abilene 45 min. $5 a square would be almost double the going rate around here. I do have a guard light I could park under and leave on. Yea I think I can make a cash box that would take quite a ruckus to get into. Maybe put the PayPal address on there too to give folks options. Our lake camp is kinda like a little community, not that crime isn’t there occasionally, but most the folks there are regulars.
I wouldn’t be opposed to doing it at some other small lake camps. Trying to do things to keep cash flow up in the off season besides selling BBQ joints wood way too cheap.

Great idea as many people no longer carry cash, or have a stack of $20s that they got from the ATM. BUT, this will only work if there is cell coverage at your sale location.
 
SamT1

What part of Texas are you in? We do a little of $200K in State Park firewood self service sales a year......We are as far north as Lake Arrowhead, as far south as Corpus Christi, As far east as Martin Creek and as far wast as Abilene but mostly concentrated in the DFW area. even inside a state park the average self serve/honor box shrinkage rate (theft) runs about 22%....and the darker it gets at night the less honest people seem to get. We went into a very large park because someone cut the locks on 3 honor boxes and made off with about $2000....now they don't have to worry about it......Just consider those issues when you price your wood.
May be a correlation between how dark it gets and how drunk campers get. 22% is a big hit to take.
 
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