Key Protection is One Key to Success

The phone call wasn’t really all that -unusual. A Colorado man had bought a coin -laundry and called the News asking for advice. He said the business looked as if it was doing more business than the seller had reported to him at the time he bought. Also, the -water bill showed it should have a better cash flow than he was -receiving in weekly collections.

We asked him several questions such as how many previous owners were there? He thought three or four. We asked if he had asked the -water company to check his meter for accuracy. He had, and it was fine. Were there previous employees or service people who might possibly still have keys? With an answer of, “I honestly don’t know,” our advice was really simple. Bite the bullet, and change out all of the locks and keys!

The owner objected to that on the basis of cost and effort. But, he finally decided to do it and asked for some source names that we provided. He called us back in a few months and gave us the following report.

It seems his income from his machines had suddenly jumped over 25% after he changed out the locks. Which meant that one of the previous owners or one of their workers still had keys and may have been silently taking part in the laundry’s cash flow for some time, possibly for years.

That must have been true because someone left behind a full ring of old laundry keys in the mail box. His silent partner must have been really -disappointed to have left the keys -behind, as if to say you finally caught on to -wh-at I was doing.-

Sad to say this laundry facility had been giving income to others beside the owners for some time. This is not an isolated case. It -happens many times in older laundries.

The owner of a three laundry chain had time to kill and stopped by a distributor’s -office to chat. Things were great and he was very happy with his business. He noticed one of the several new high security locks on the distributor’s desk and examined one. He asked questions as to how they worked, played with them a while then left. A few weeks later he telephoned in an order for locks for all three laundries. No reason except that he just liked the way the locks worked and thought that they would help speed up the coin c-ollection process.

After the new locks had been installed for a while, he told the distributor he was amazed to find that by just changing locks on his -washers and dryers his -clientele was so pleased that they had increased his cash flow by about twenty percent in all three laundries. It was a pleasant surprise to him that his customers had responded so well to this small change.

He had to be told that it was far more likely that he was being robbed for years. The owner hadn’t recognize what had been going on and that he had made this right -decision totally by accident.

After this owner began to accept what had been going on and that he had been losing cash flow for the several years he had owned his chain, he got angry. It was mostly at his own stupidity at being bilked for years and not realizing it. The extra income -“created” by the locks has paid him back the complete cost for the new locks every month since he bought them, and boy does he guard his keys.

These two examples aren’t just war -stories to illustrate a point. This kind of careless loss of income goes on continuously, and has from the beginning of the industry. Some owners are just clueless, others are too trusting and a few are just too lazy to check.

The first thing that laundry experts will suggest is for owners to secure their keys by knowing where all of them are at all times. This means you must have the locks and keys sent in sealed packages to be opened by the laundry operator on arrival. Take all keys, count them and then give only one key to the installer and get it back when he’s done. That way the laundry owner knows that none of his keys can be used against his interests.

The backup keys should be retained in a secure, locked place known only to the l-aundry owner. Many of them will use a safety -deposit box at a bank. Keep the one set of keys that are used daily where you always know where they are at all times, and don’t get careless with the keys. When leaving your laundry, always make sure to check to see the keys are in your pocket or are safely secured.

One laundry chain manager lost all of his keys by putting them on the top of his car when he reached into his pocket for car keys. Then he drove off leaving them on the roof of the car. No matter how hard he looked for them later, they were gone. You can imagine his problem in trying to re-drive his route and scanning the parking lot. They were gone and his investors were stuck with a huge bill to replace the lost key ring.

Yes, he had backups, but were the keys for the laundry chain in the hands of people who knew what the keys were for? If so, could they take the chance? The decision was to replace the locks in the coin laundry he was leaving when they fell off the roof of his car and to switch around the locks in his other laundries as well. In the case of the other coin laundries in that operation, he hoped that the finder of the keys would not know where they were located.

Aside from losing keys, how does one know they may have a silent business partner in their laundry operation, or know for sure they don’t? You can do as so many laundry owners do, just take it on faith, and assume everything is well. Or you can take an aggressive stance concerning your money and check constantly for signs of coin predation and other theft.

Our readers will find that there are many ways to keep from becoming a victim of coin box theft. All of these methods require some time and take planning to accomplish. But, not much time will be required and all of the methods and tricks will be cost free.

Even if you are certain your laundry is a ‘skim free zone’, it won’t cost much to check it. The best thing is to find out you are right. The worst is you may be wrong.

From experience, we have found some of the easiest ways is to “Salt the Mine”. That is to plant certain coin boxes with a specific number of marked coins. When doing the next collection, place the coins from those machines into separate bags. Remove and separate the marked coins and count them. If they are all there, relax, but only a little.

Those machines were not skimmed, but what about the others? Select more machines for testing. Do it through your equipment and if there is no evidence of skimming, you can relax for six or eight months. By then, you’ll want to start again. Why? Well there are only so many key combinations, and meanwhile, some crook may have found a key that will work on some machines in your laundry.

Marking the coins can be done in a myriad of ways. Our favorite is to place rolls of coins in a stack, then paint the coin edges. Quarters tend to lie flat in coin boxes, so no one should notice the edges when they are stealing your money. This is especially true when you color coins using a can of hardly noticeable yellow spray paint. You will see them, only because you know they are there, or should be there when you count your bags. The thief won’t be looking and so will not see that the coins are marked.

Some laundry owners use blue or black spray paint to color the coin. Some others scratch a mark on the face of coins. One tells us he uses a certain number of foreign coins whose size is the same as a U.S. quarter. That can also fool the thief because people do use same sized foreign coins to steal a wash.

Whichever salting method you choose to use, it isn’t time consuming, and it is so cheap and easy to have peace of mind when you take the time to check whether or not you are being skimmed. Remember, when times are tough, many more attempts will be made to get at your money. When someone has the keys to your money, your success will be at risk.

 

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