4 Day Rentals!

This has been a long an tortuous journey, but our customers have asked for it (over and over) so we’re going to automate the 4 day (AKA long weekend) rental option – you’ll see it listed by most items already and it will be up for the others within a day or two. I’ll go into more detail below for those who have questions, but the bottom line is you now have the option of renting for 4 day minimum time periods rather than 1 week. That means weekend shooters can get delivery on Thursday, shoot for the weekend, send it back Monday. Pros can get delivery Monday to shoot for the week and send it back Friday.

It takes us a while to get all of the prices added for the 4 day option: it will be done by the end of this weekend so if the option isn’t there for the items you want, it will be shortly. In the meantime, please read the FAQs below before placing a 4 day rental – it will save us both lots of time.

The 4 day rental FAQs

What does 4 days mean

You get the lens the afternoon of one day (lets say Thursday). You shoot with it for 4 days (F, Sa, Su, M in this case) and send it back Monday afternoon (or early evening, depending on your local UPS store hours). Note: after the UPS store closes, its not Monday afternoon, its Tuesday in our world. You’d be late because the lens will be returned late.

What if I’m late?

We charge you a late fee equal to 25% of the 4 day rental for each day its late.

I really just want a 1 day (or 2, 3, half-day, 22 minute) rental.

That’s fine. We can do all of those — at the 4 day rate. Read the detailed explanations for more info.

I want to change my current reservation to a 4 day rental

Just go to your account page, cancel your current reservation, and place a new order.

What else?

Nothing I can think of. Otherwise everything is the same.

Detailed explanations for those who want to know how we decided prices, etc.

• There’s a fixed cost to process every rental. Orders taken and printed; lenses pulled from stock, cleaned, tested, and inspected; boxes packed and shipped. When they come back they’re cleaned, tested, and inspected again. We’re very efficient but that takes about 40 minutes of salaried time per lens and the cost is the same no matter how long the rental.
• The risk of loss, theft, shipping damage, etc. is the same for every rental no matter how long. Again, that’s a fixed cost and its prorated per rental no matter how long the rental lasts.
• Lenses are out of stock for 5 days outside of the rental time for packing, shipping, unpacking, inspection, restocking, etc. So a 7 day rental is gone for 12 days, a 4 day rental for 9 days. If you do the math, a 4 day rental is out-of-stock for 75% of the time that a 7 day rental is.
• When a lens is reserved a copy must be taken out of stock. Again, this is the same for a 4 day or 7 day rental and there’s cost involved in not having a lens available to rent.

Given all of that, we calculated out what the 4 day rental cost should be and actually are doing it for a bit less than that. It seems to be a service people really want so we hope that increased business will make it worthwhile.

A final note for local (Memphis area) renters who are about to call and ask for a 2 day rate, etc.

Please don’t. I’m rarely this blunt, I hate offending people, but subtle just hasn’t worked here. We’re an extremely efficient mail-order shipping warehouse. We give our customers exceptional service and our customers are exceptionally helpful in allowing us to keep everything on time and efficient. Dealing with hundreds of customers every week I’m still amazed at how nice almost all are, and how they value our service and work with us to keep things moving smoothly.

Except for a number of our local renters, who, for whatever reason, are far more likely to return items late, dirty, and damaged (4 times more likely, actually). And who take up amazing amounts of staff time asking for us to do all kinds of things we’ve stated clearly we can’t do As a life-long Memphian, I hate the idea of not offering local pickup service to Memphis customers. As a business owner with a bottom line, I’m at the point that a few more problems are going to force me to do it.