Breaking glass… Not hot case of…

Breaking glass… Making more sales

Back in the day auto windshields weren’t made of safety glass. If you had a wreck the odds were good that your noggin was going through it and your chances of getting badly lacerated were even better!

But then a Toledo based company named Libbey Owens Ford invented a new product they called safety glass. It consisted of two sheets of tempered glass with a sheet of plastic sandwiched between them.

To market their new invention they dispatched their sales force to sell it to the auto industry and anyone else who might be interested in this innovative product. Turns out they had one salesman who wildly outsold all the others. So they brought him to find out his secret.

He showed them how he used a hammer to demonstrate the product by breaking a small square of it he would hold in his hand. They immediately equipped all their reps with hammers and squares. But six months later he was still outshining the others, so they brought him again in to see how he was doing it.

You can imagine their chagrin when he told them, “Oh, now I hand the hammer to the prospect”.

Here’s an idea, put an ounce of your concentrated laundry detergent in a small bottle and hand it to that prospect and ask them to use it to process a load of overnight sheets. And maybe that same idea be used to demonstrate cleaning that greasy tile and blackened grouting.

Next up: Dividing by three.

Not hot case of … Foaming wash tanks

For many of us, the workings of defoamed detergents are a bit of a mystery. Often that uncertainty is the result of having mixed results with them. Sometimes they produce great results and sometimes not so much. Occasionally the reason for that inconsistency is on us, but sometimes it’s a mechanical failure in the dishmachine.

Either way the reason for both outcomes is likely temperature – or more accurately the lack of it.

Warewashing detergent defoamers are compounds that’re unstable at temperatures above 150f. Once defoamers are exposed to the normal wash tank temperature they “fall” out of solution.

But, if the tank heater has failed, or the thermostat is set too low, the tank operates below the magic 150F number, the defoamer stays in solution and foam can accumulate.

Because it’s lighter than water, the defoamer floats on top of the bath much like an oil slick on a puddle. There the defoamer reduces the surface tension in the bubbles, and they burst. That prevents accumulation and as a result foam can’t build enough to interfere with impingement or otherwise mess with your well planned day!

Next up: Prescrapping and prevention.