Andrew Cutler

May be different in your area, but this was our experience with UniFirst: abysmal

The one that we are going with is month-to-month.  We only have to pay for the embroidered shirts if we boot them before two years is up.  Live and learn.

On 11/7/2017 at 5:11 AM, alfredauto said:

Sounds like a great opportunity. Once you have a big enough customer base you can easily migrate to your own shop. 

I would make it very clear up front that while you are paying rent it is your shop. If you want to be his service dept. get it all worked out before you commit. Used cars come back fairly regularly with time consuming jobs. The dealer will want that beauty he just sold in the shop and on the lift like right now with someone fixing it when there's a family fuming at him. Some dealers wait until a car sells to do inspections. That means he's got a fat carrot dangling in his face to get it serviced immediately when someone buys it. 

Or, he might expect full use of the lifts. Just be sure to be perfectly clear what you want in exchange for your rent money. 

Ditto.  We've been in that situation, and this can make it difficult to service your clients.  If you're doing work for the lot it should be fill work, not scheduled, and shouldn't stop you from taking appointments from YOUR customers.

This is a rant, pure and simple, but I hope that it can serve as a cautionary tale for others.  Unifirst came in with a proposal as the "AAA preferred uniform vendor".  As we are a AAA approved shop we qualified for special pricing, almost 30% less than what we were paying at that time.  We gave them our business and it has been a cluster since.  It took almost 6 months for them to deliver, and when they did the sizes were all over the map.  About half of my employees (and myself) had to have size changes.  They embroidered all our dark shirts with dark logos and had to re-do them which took months.  They actually embroidered them wrong TWICE before they got it right.  My tech's shirts came back with with huge oil and rust stains after their first washing and have never been clean since.  The towels are usually oily and sometimes have metal shavings in them.  They routinely mis-deliver and fail to deliver uniforms, leaving techs short for the week.  I've had the service manager, plant manager, and regional manager all in my office to tell me that this would all be corrected, to no avail.  We have a new service starting in December and I anticipate threats to sue on the three year agreement they require.  I've been cataloging, photographing and corresponding with them over the past 8 months and I am confident that we can prove that they are unable to provide anything close to the level of service they promised.  I have learned, yet again, that you get what you pay for.  Don't let Unifirst in the door.