posted
You know how they have things like mobile car valets and ice cream vans that come to your company car park? I was wondering if anyone has set up a mobile massage service along similar lines. A luxury camper van with blacked out windows, soft music, candles and aromatic oils, Pull up outside an especially stressed company (take your pick) and offer 20 minutes of relaxing massage to high paying executives. I see on Google that there's no shortage of "mobile massage" services (yeah, right) that come to your own home, but this seems like a much better idea.
What other mobile services should be offered? I bet there's scope for a mobile MP3 top up service. Every other person round here has an iPod, or a Creative Zen in more discerning cases. Would be great to be able to wonder out at lunchtime and have a couple of new albums loaded on for a couple of quid each.
I suppose you have to get some sort of license to just park in the street and start trading, but people already do it as I say so it can't be that difficult. Be quite a fun life just driving around a regular route and filling people's lives with joy.
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posted
Imagine how cool it would be to fit one of these out:
It would have a row of headphone jacks down the side with small screens and selectors in the style of an iPod. The customer would plug their own phones in and just browse around having a listen to whatever they fancied. Maybe sipping a free coffee or tea while they do so. If they wanted to buy something then they'd come round to the till at the back and plug in to a USB port and get what they wanted straight onto their player.
I know this is what online music stores do anyway, but a) most people can't do that at work and b) you'd have a bit of word of mouth, some chart lists on display, a bit of chatter between friends or colleagues, more visible cash exchanging, just the general human touch aspect.
I wish I had the nerve to do something like this. I bet it would take off big time.
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quote:Originally posted by dang65: Would be great to be able to wonder out at lunchtime and have a couple of new albums loaded on for a couple of quid each.
Even better would be if you could load a new album onto your MP3 player while you were still sitting at your computer. Imagine that!
-------------------- Now that you've called me by name? Posts: 2007
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We do actually have a massage therapist come to our office every fortnight, and you get 10 or 15 mins on her special massage bench thing, which is set up in the boardroom. It's ace. She sets up candles and bowls of water with stones and lilies in, and soft music, and then gives you a good seeing to.
quote:Originally posted by dang65: Would be great to be able to wonder out at lunchtime and have a couple of new albums loaded on for a couple of quid each.
Even better would be if you could load a new album onto your MP3 player while you were still sitting at your computer. Imagine that!
Yes, I've already dealt with that point though, look.
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posted
How would the Dragons react to this idea, once I'd got the three-wheeler van up the stairs into their den? That's the real decider.
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posted
I just ran the idea past a colleague who has an iPod and he gave me one of those loony on the bus kind of looks so I'm starting to have doubts now. I need to do some more market research, perhaps in a mental hospital or something.
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posted
I thought downloadable music was copyright protected so it'll only work for the person who buys it or something? What you're talking about doing, really, is charging people an overhead to make copies of stuff they don't actually own. Which is really illegal.
Why wouldn't they just wait till they're at home and use itunes or whatnot rather than paying more and getting less?
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quote:Originally posted by Ringo: Why wouldn't they just wait till they're at home and use itunes or whatnot rather than paying more and getting less?
Well, I was thinking of it as a kind of franchised version of iTunes. All it would do is cut out the broadband connection aspect. Other than that it would be identical, but faster, more friendly to use, more of a personal service feel about it. It would be like an old fashioned record shop where you'd get to know the owner and have a chat about the latest releases which they'd be clued up on. That sort of thing.
But I think that is so long gone now that few people remember what it was like and no one particularly feels a need for it. Shame really.
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posted
So what you're really talking about is a sngle-terminal mobile internet cafe, with complimentary music?
I'm not seeing how you're meant to be making money.
Look at it this way, what's to stop me coming outside in my lunch break, listening to a load of music, noting down what I like then paying less for it when I get home in the evening than I would pay you?
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quote:Originally posted by Ringo: Look at it this way, what's to stop me coming outside in my lunch break, listening to a load of music, noting down what I like then paying less for it when I get home in the evening than I would pay you?
Yes, I imagine that Dixon's and Curry's have to worry about that all the time. You walk in, check out their tellies, get a salesman to show you how it all works and which is the best one - then go home and buy it off eBay for half the price.
I think it's a risk that shops take. People want things right there and then, and unless they are ridiculously overpriced then it's not a problem.
I mean HMV sell DVDs for more than Amazon do, but they still seem to fly off the shelves don't they?
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posted
I've got an excellent idea! I'll get myself a transit van filled with all sorts of stationary, pens, fancy envelopes and books of stamps. In the back of the van will be an oak desk and we can invite people on their lunch to write a few letters for a small charge. Not everyone has access to email, so it gives people the chance to pop a quick letter in the post to ask if someone fancies a pint next month.
Louche
Carved TMO on her clit just to make you feel bad
posted
I hate it when people are mean about Dang's nice ideas. He just wants to bring the world a little bit of happiness, you know.
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quote:Originally posted by Ringo: Look at it this way, what's to stop me coming outside in my lunch break, listening to a load of music, noting down what I like then paying less for it when I get home in the evening than I would pay you?
Yes, I imagine that Dixon's and Curry's have to worry about that all the time. You walk in, check out their tellies, get a salesman to show you how it all works and which is the best one - then go home and buy it off eBay for half the price.
I think it's a risk that shops take. People want things right there and then, and unless they are ridiculously overpriced then it's not a problem.
I mean HMV sell DVDs for more than Amazon do, but they still seem to fly off the shelves don't they?
Ok let’s do a bit of maths here. We’ll make a few assumptions. Say every day you’re going to be parking up for two hours outside of an office. Assuming you get a steady number of customers, let’s imagine that in that space of time, you sell 20 albums. That’s a reasonable amount, right? Now, you’re acting as a reseller for itunes, basically, so itunes are still going to be taking their but plus allowing you a markup on the price for your own pocket.
What’s a reasonable markup? Well maybe you can put £2 on the price of every album. Albums are, what, £7.99 from itunes so you’d be selling them for 9.99. I don’t think you’d be able to mark it up any more than that, there’s a limit to how much more people are likely to pay.
So if you’re selling 20 albums a day, and you’re getting £2 from every album, that’s £40 a day that’s going into your pocket. Let’s give you the benefit of the doubt here and say that maybe on average it works out at £50 a day.
Let’s think about your costs.
Let’s assume that your van does 30mpg and you are doing an average of 20 miles a day. These are conservative figures because really you’d have to keep travelling around the country in order to keep getting customers.
SO. That’s 3 litres, roughly, of fuel per day. On an average day. Call it £3 a day for fuel.
Next, let’s think about the running of the equipment you use. I’ve chosen for you the Honda EU20i generator (http://www.justgenerators.co.uk/pages/HondaEU20i.htm) This uses, in a 2 hour period, about a litre of fuel. Let’s say another £1 per day to run the generator.
Long term costs are what’s going to really knacker you though. Let’s work out what you earn in a year, minus what we’ve already covered. Let’s be generous and say that you work 50 weeks a year. You’re earning, so far, £46 per day. Over 50 weeks, assuming you’re not working weekends, you’re generating £11500. Is this enough to live on? Let’s hope so, because immediately we can say that £300 of that (if we’re being really generous) will go towards insuring the van. You’ll need to tax the van too so let’s say £150 road tax, and then once a year you need to service the van so we’ll call that another £150. So we can write off £600 of that straight away. That leaves us with £10900 per year that you’re taking home as profit.
Let’s break that down into a salary then. That’s about £908 a month. Now I’m no business expert so I’m not sure at which point you have to pay tax and national insurance, but let’s assume it’s at this point and say that 20% of that goes to PAYE. That’s about £725 a month going into your pocket. What can’t be accounted for is the franchise and licensing costs, how much you’d be paying to an accountant, etc etc. We’d also have to assume that you’re going to have to have some kind of high speed mobile internet access for the van. We can reasonably knock another £100 a month off for that. And that’s assuming that my really optimistic figures come true, and you never have a bad month.
And all of this is assuming that people even want to use your service in the first place. At the end of the day, someone selling downloaded music out of the back of a van in an office car park sounds so stupidly illegal that I doubt anyone would have any confidence in you whatsoever. And at the end of the day, your 20 albums a day are nothing to the likes of itunes who sell tens of thousands of albums every day. You're relying on a franchise which doesn't exist, based on a premise which is sketchy at best, and a customer base who are already getting everything they want from a service which is cheaper and more convenient as it doesn't involve them having to stand around in a car park for half an hour.
edit: maybe a mobile UBB fixing service would be better...
posted
Maybe I'll just do it as a hobby at the weekend then. Like those people that sell homemade jewellery at craft fairs. We'll see how it goes from there shall we.
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quote:Originally posted by Louche: I hate it when people are mean about Dang's nice ideas. He just wants to bring the world a little bit of happiness, you know.
I wasn't trying to be mean. I feel really bad now.
quote:Originally posted by New Way Of Decay: I wasn't trying to be mean. I feel really bad now.
Well, I thought your idea was brilliant NWoD. I'm a bit worried about the competition though, I have to say. Would you consider a buy-out?
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