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Tuesday, June 02, 2009

A Giant Automatic Parts Washer

Here’s something you’d probably never guess that we sell.  This is a gigantic automatic parts washer.  It’s made by our pressure washer company Alkota.

So what you do is stick anything you want clean in that basket there up to and including an engine block and let it go to work.  It’s got a large reservoir full of cleaning solvent.  The machine heats up the solvent to make it clean better.  The factory guy that delivered it said you’ll let it go for a couple hours to get it really spic and span.

We’ve been an Alkota dealer for over 12 years.  They make a great hot water pressure washer and we sell a ton of them.  Well actually we have an expert, Donnie Johnson,  with years and years of experience selling them that does the work. 

We also repair and refurbish pressure washers.  Donnie will take in a trade of your old machine.

This is the first time he’s sold one of these parts washers.  I didn’t even know they had them. 

Here’s another picture with one of their stationary hot water pressure washers in the foreground.

Alkota is made and headquartered out of South Dakota.  It’s always nice to deal with neighbors. 

Our Internet Was Down Yesterday

Yesterday our internet was down for a good part of the day.  Not only that we were running statements for our charge accounts so we couldn’t use our “back office” computer system. 

Finally we started a purge of some old data from 2003 and 2004 on our sales reporting module on Friday.  That’s an enormous job and it’s still running. 

The most important thing is that all of our stores are operating without any glitches.  Some systems nowdays require a constant connection with your head office.  Ours doesn’t so as far as the customers could tell yesterday things were normal.

But with everything down yesterday our buyers pretty much had their hands tied.  They didn’t have anything they could do.  I came in late in the morning because of a family commitment.  I puttered around a bit but after a couple hours I was wondering why I was here if I couldn’t do anything. 

The systems today are fantastic.  We have information at our fingertips that would have taken hours and hours to get in the old days.  But that comes with a price.  We’ve become totally dependent on keeping the systems up.