Giving to Charity

I recently came across an interesting concept online and wondered if it could be applied at the car wash somehow. The website http://www.changeroundup.com explains in more detail but I will try to give you the basic concept. What they do is parner with online businesses who sell products or services through some sort of checkout process. At the end of the transaction when the customer is about to pay they are asked if they would like to round the transaction to the nearest dollar and give the diffence to one of a number of charities. It also gives them the ability to give more than just the spare change if they wish to.

I like the idea - how would you implement the idea on an Auto Sentry?

If you have even dollar prices could you round up one dollar?

Ron,

I could think of two ways to do this. One way might be to setup an 'extra service' called 'Give to Charity' that would round the price up by $1.00. This would require much manual labor in the fact that you would have to produce your shift reports and get the count of those 'extra services' and then manually donate the money yourself. The other option would be to use an external program, such as one for the processing of stored value cards, that would allow you to do this automatically each time a gift card is used. GiftWatch could possibly be modified to do just that.

It would be easier to select a day in a week and donate $1 from each wash purchased to a charity. If that's too much, you could create a wash package that costs $1 more, for that extra dollar to go to charity.

This is a great idea. I have seen it work in several grocery stores, and they asked for the pennies to give to charity. Most people will want their change back if it is grater than say 5 cents, so if you have 200 customers a day at $.05, that will be $10, if everyone participates. You need thousands of customers to be of value.

Jimmy