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Renting equipment

H

htref

New member
I was following up on a craigslist ad about a dishwasher and during the conversation the guy mentioned that he rents his dishwasher.

I’m thinking it might be a way to reduce start up costs.

Anyone here rent equipment?

Things I’m considering renting:
5’ prep table or table top prep refer
dish washer
hobart mixer
double door fridge

Anything I might add or should subtract?
 
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In my opinion, I would shy away from renting equipment if at all possible. If you absolutely have to rent or finance a piece of equipment. I financed two brand new upright coolers, a prep table, and my POS system. What it ended up getting me is an extra $474 a month in bills just to break even. Renting in my opinion would be worse because at the end of the month you still don’t own even a piece of the equipment. Just my thoughts.
 
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But on the other side of the coin…we do LEASE to own our dishwasher. It’s mine at the end of this year after 3 years of monthly payments. When added together the payments are only slightly more than the outright purchase would have been. This is all through one of our food suppliers, check with yours and I’m sure you’ll find a similar arrangement.

The plus has been the few times we needed a service tech to take a look, it was taken care of out of their pocket, not mine. The decision I have coming up is when this is off lease and I own it outright, is it going to stay running without trouble for another 3 years, or do I take another one on a similar program now and avoid the hassles. Hmmm…
 
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Another thing on the dishwasher lease/rent is to watch out for the clause on where and how long you have to buy your chemicals from. Some companies do have a cheap rent/lease payment, but overcharge for the chemicals to make up for it.

we bought a used one from our food supplier too, we made monthly payments for 6 months, but in the contract we had to buy all our chemicals from them for a year, In our case it didn’t matter, we would have bought them from there any ways. but because we still do buy the chemicals from them—I have never paid for a repair or routine maintenance call on the machine in 16 years.
 
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Hi Htrif :

Most food supply companies have dish washer programs where they supply a unit and maintain it for varying fees in addition to purchasing their chemicals.

As to the other equipment you are contemplating. I do not know of anyone that rents those items to restaurants.

As stated in other postings the lease to own programs are the only course if you cannot obtain financing at your bank

George Mills
 
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I did a lease to own on our first POS system 14 years ago. The deal was three years payments with a $1 buy out at the end. I liked it since it did not use up my credit line at the time and the POS was $16,000 that would have been inconvenient for me to come up with.

Key elements to check out in a lease are:
  1. Effective interest rate.
  2. Term and buy-out.
  3. Who maintains or replaces. There could be unusual conditions in this section depending on who you are working with.
 
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