This morning I took my Honda in to get its oil changed. I took it to the neighborhood Jiffylube because that’s the nearest oil changing station. When I arrived they asked me to go inside where an older man was glad to start chatting with me. I didn’t mind the company but he was really far too interested in the price of my house. Then, a woman called me out to the oil changing bay to ask me about my personal information so that they’d know what size socks to send me at Christmas. OK, not really. She wanted my home address and phone number. I told her I was married, but that didn’t deter here.
Then the big up sell scheme came in. They didn’t want to change my oil. No, just changing the oil was going to be too little for them. Instead they spent 4 minutes walking me through very nicely done graphical screens showing happy little icons saying, “Pick me!” However, because I’m in no way going to buy their schpiel on how I will get better gas mileage if I pay them an extra $30.00 I passed on everything. They would have to show me the prettiest charts with large doctoral dissertations proving that my $30.00 would save me $40.00 in the long run.
With the time they wasted trying to upsell me they could have finished my oil change and I could have gone onto the grocery store and stood in the long lines there sooner. But I’m getting whiney, so I’ll stop now 😉
It’s a funny business model those lube places have created; they try to sell themselves as fast (QuickLube, JiffyLube, etc), but in order to increase profits they need to sell more services (higher margin services at that).
So, in a nutshell, the shorter time a customer is in the store, the less money they make. Their only option is to try and keep you there longer by trying to sell more services. Therefore, i stopped doing the Jiffy/Quick Lube thing when they stopped trying to provide me a useful/speedy oil change service.
I wonder if the corporate execs even considered their customers when starting the high-pressure upsell techniques.