Firewood vending

[woodshax]

At our bigger parks we go with 6 module machines (47 vending compartments can more than double that on one machine but we usually run out of space) and then put out 2 (main gate and day use area or in biggest campsite by the bathrooms) and usually restock once a week. But, on big weekends (4th of July, labor day. halloween etc) we have to restock on a Saturday and normally hang out by the machines for an hour or so or drive slowly through the camp grounds to sell off the truck to make sure we make it through the weekend....but they have real time sales data so I know exactly when they are running low and what I need to bring out.

 

[Guswhit]

If I may ask a business question? I have been trying to persuade my parks to go the machine route, but can't get them off dead center. How did you finally convince them that this was the best way to go?

 

[woodshax]

In Texas, most of the parks had piles of bundles that they bought and resold (usually bought for $2.75 and sold for $5.50 or so) but they had to pick up the wood, stack, move, keep dry etc. Then they had honor boxes for after hours sales but they had to have 2 rangers open the box count and re-count, bring it back to the main office and then someone else had to count and re-count again to enter it into the register....they hated it and when they totaled up the man hours to do all this...they were losing money. Also some parks had signage that said the money given for wood was a "donation" and some even had "a suggested price". The State HQ found out that the "suggested price" part was illegal and they were not too keen on the "donations" part either. Now the Rangers can do park ranger things and we give them 10% (before tax) of the gross every month. My first park had no wood sales and they had a "friends group" with a gift shop so we did a contract with them and set a machine outside their shop. Then The Park Superintendent started bragging to all his superintendent friends and they got with the State vending contracting officer and said they wanted one in their parks. So the contracting officer wrote up a test contract for one park and then just kept giving us new contracts for local parks faster than we can make them.