Alright time to be honest with you guys. Ready?  The lotions work.  In fact they can make you look tanner (more tan? Whichever… you know what I mean) by as much as 40%. That’s an industry estimate, not mine. And the prices on our lotions are usually lower than most other salons. Sometimes by a substantial amount.  But somewhere along the line somethings gotta give.

Twice now people have passed on buying our tanning lotions because they could save probably around $10 by buying it on eBay. And then that’s exactly what they did. Well guess what? Selling the lotions kinda keeps us in business. I mean, would you order a Coke at McDonald’s, and then bring in your own hamburgers? In fact most of the big salons force you to buy lotions from them. Usually at the time of sign up. In fact “they” usually prohibit the use of any lotion in their salons that you didn’t buy from them regardless of how much you spent on it somewhere else, because frankly they don’t care whether you tan there or not. We don’t want to operate that way.

We have always had restrictions of some type, use of SPF’s for example. They damage the acrylics on the bed so you can’t use it here. Oils are another. They don’t come off of the acrylics and make the floor slippery like ice and I don’t have the money to get sued by someone that slipped on an oily floor. Anyway, I know lotions at some places can easily surpass $100(!) a bottle, so we never asked anyone that the lotions manufactured for tanning beds that they bought somewhere else not be used here. But we have to stay in business too. Frankly I don’t know how to solve this little problem. I guess we could simply raise the price of tans back to a more normal price.  But we don’t really want to do that either.

Look. We have lotions. They start at less than 20 bucks and work awesome. Obviously we don’t carry every lotion manufactured, as there are hundreds, and hundreds available for sale.  So just because we don’t currently don’t carry “Love My Tan!!” or “Big Steve’s Super Dark Blah Blah Whatever” doesn’t man I can’t get it for you. Usually the next day if necessary.

Let’s do some quick math. One of our best lotions is $49.99. One person wanted to buy it “online” for $30. She save money right? Great. But she paid $11.00 for shipping and it took four days to get it. So really she paid $41.00 before tax.  In other words she paid virtually the same price that she would have, had she bought it here. But I guess her perception was that she got a deal. Unfortunately if that continues, people can pay the 41.00 online, and then pay $22.00 for a single session tan in an identical bed somewhere else.

It’s not easy offering tans in any bed for $4, but we want everyone that wants to tan to be able to afford it. So we’ll continue as long as we can, but I have cats to feed too. You don’t want my cats to starve do you, you big meanie?

Bob