Written down so you can check
Anybody can say their drinks are good. So we wrote down seven things you can actually catch us breaking. Every one of them costs us something — that is how we picked them. A rule that is free is not really a rule.
If we break one, tell us. The form goes straight to us, not to a robot.
The machine holds two flavors at once. Everybody else who rents these lists only grown-up drinks, so at a lot of parties the kids end up with juice boxes next to a machine they are not allowed to touch. We think that is silly. One of your two flavors can always be ours.
If your party is all adults, use both tanks for adults. It is your party. We are just never going to be the reason a kid gets left out of it.
Costs us: a second mix to make, for no extra moneyHarper is 11 and Finley is 8. We make the frozen part, which has no alcohol in it at all. If you want a margarita, a grown-up pours their own tequila in at your house, out of their own bottle.
We put this on the website before anyone asked us about it. That is the only time a promise like this really counts.
Costs us: we say no to jobs over thisNearly everything a party costs us is the driving, the setting up and the cleaning, and that is the same whether twenty people come or sixty. So we do not charge per person. And we do not put the price up just because it is 104° out and you really want a slushie.
Costs us: the extra money everyone else makes on a hot weekendThe whole ingredient list, not “natural and artificial flavors.” That includes the boring bits, and it includes admitting when something is just syrup out of a jug — which our Classic mix is, same as everyone else’s.
If we get to say the good stuff, we have to say that bit too. Otherwise it is not a list, it is an advert.
Costs us: we cannot pretend the Classic is handmadeSugar is what turns a drink into a slush instead of a block of ice. You can measure it, and we do. So when we say a recipe is right, we will put the measurement on the website next to it, plus how cold the machine was set — because the same recipe at a different temperature is a different drink.
Nobody else in this business does that. It means a competitor can read our homework. We are fine with that.
Costs us: nowhere to hide a bad batchYou do not rinse anything, scrub anything or drive anywhere. We come back the next morning, take it away dirty, and it goes to the next party clean. Cleaning one of these properly takes about an hour and it is easily the worst part of this job.
Costs us: an hour of a Sunday, every single rentalWe are 8 and 11 and we are figuring this out as we go. Recipes fail. One of the numbers on this very website was wrong for a week before somebody caught it, and it is still written down in the Lab where you can read it.
A business that only shows you the parts that worked is not showing you much.
Costs us: looking perfectWe wrote nine first. Two got cut, and both for the same reason: we could not actually keep them.
One said half the machine is always for kids. That sounds lovely and it is a bad way to run a business — plenty of parties are all grown-ups, and promising to waste a tank at those is promising something nobody asked for. What we actually meant is rule 1: the kids’ option is always there, and it is always free. That we can keep.
The other promised a no-dye version of every single flavor. We have not built those yet. Writing it down as if it already existed would have made this page the exact thing it is supposed to be the opposite of. It is on the Fresh Press page as something we are working on, which is where it belongs until it is real.
Why we bothered writing any of this. Because a rule that is easy to copy is worth nothing. Anyone could add “we care about quality” to their website in ten seconds, and a few of them have. So the test was not does it sound nice. It was does it cost us something — an hour, a mix, money we do not make. That is why each one has a line under it saying what it costs.
And one thing we are not doing. We thought about making it a badge other companies could earn. Turns out there is a law about that: whoever hands out that kind of badge is not allowed to sell the thing the badge is for. We would have to quit renting machines to go around judging everyone else’s. So these are just our rules, and anyone is welcome to copy them.
Seven rules, one price, two flavors, and a candy on every cup.
Check your date