Holding the Bag

Sometimes the ideas you need to gain a business advantage are very complex, involving intricate arrangements of high finance, specialized insider knowledge and technical expertise, unique innovations in high technology, or unbelievable timing to seize the perfect moment to make your move. And sometimes all you need is about five cents worth of nylon…

The drycleaners near our house recently asked us if we wanted to sign up for their VIP program. This is less hype than it is a large nylon laundry bag with your name and account number printed on a tag attached to the drawstring. I’ve seen these programs before – they were fairly common in Los Angeles while we were living there – but this particular company had managed to find a new wrinkle: the service is free. Most of these VIP services have used the speed and convenience factors as their main selling points – you don’t have to wait in line to drop off your laundry, just toss the bag on the counter and run – and have required some lengthy registration forms and a deposit for the bag. Which is why people like me have traditionally blown them off, of course…

Now, I’m not attacking the companies back in Los Angeles. Most of them were using nice canvas bags with metal grommets for the drawstring holes and the customer’s information printed on them, which have the advantage of not needing replacement for years at a time (and a nicely unique, giving a real feeling of a relationship being established), but have the drawback of being expensive enough that you wouldn’t want to have to keep replacing them. Hence the deposit, and the information to establish who you really are and where you actually live…

The difficulty here is that the value to me (of being able to just dump my laundry and run) was not worth the time or money involved in joining the VIP program. It’s not that the amounts of money or time involved were especially large, it’s just that since I usually dropped my laundry off before 7:00 am (where there was usually no wait to drop off an order in the usual way), the value created by the VIP service wasn’t worth it to me. This would be even more likely now, since I spend most of my days dressed as a grad student (jeans, knit shirts, sneakers) and only dry-clean a few items each month…

Using the cheap nylon bags, our local drycleaner doesn’t really have to worry about people walking off with them (or just misplacing them) since these things only cost a few cents each; thus, they can do away with the formal requirements of the VIP service. They’re not creating the same sense of “belonging” that a customized bag give you, but neither are they dealing with the big-city formality that would make such a thing more of an issue. And I’d be willing to bet that you could apply the same idea to any number of other “frequent customer” programs, depending on what your business does and where it is located…

Which is why I’m calling this concept to your attention in the first place, of course…