[SML] Folding chair rental questions--

[Jeffrey Kanyuck]

Ben,
     The college I work for rents for the most part started out renting.  After a while it did buy 800 seats after renting a few times and rent anything over that number that we still need. This was to help abate problems with delivery and pick up times and other scheduling. Then we also have them around even when we didn't expect to need them.
      The college bought all black metal tube and plastic chairs. Got the Velcro wire wraps for holding them together for Fire Code. Take a small second longer to deal with then zip ties, but, now we aren't buying them over and over and having to clean them up also after taking the chairs apart after an event.
      The big thing with the tube chairs is to treat them decently. Then, check them as you are putting them out. Briefly look for bent tubes, cracks or color changes in the plastic showing they have been bent.
       We've never had one collapse on our patrons. (knock on wood) We looked at other chairs that might be more comfortable and hold up better under wear. But, the initial expense was more than the college was wanting to bear. They are thinking of slowly buying better chairs later and for certain events using them in the higher cost seating areas. And that would allow us to wean out original chairs that become dilapidated.

Good luck,
Jeff Kanyuck




From: On Behalf Of Ben Hain via Stagecraft
Sent: Thursday, February 16, 2017 10:53 AM

Subject: [SML] Folding chair rental questions--

Hi-

On my campus, we're in planning meetings for spring commencement and one of the issues is finding good quality folding chairs in volumes of about 1200 chairs.
The local rental place has the regular, cheap, metal tubing, plastic seat folding chair. And last year one collapsed under a guest. So we're trying to be extra cautious this year.
Anything nicer than the cheap folding chair becomes expensive when looking at 1200 of them.
I'm curious what other venues do in this situation?
Do you own your own chairs?
Where do you rent from?
Do you budget for the cost of the nicer chairs or go with the cheap ones?
Being in Rochester MN, we don't have many local options; shipping may be involved as well.
Thanks for offering opinions-
Benjamin Hain
Hill Theater
Technical Diretor
Rochester Community and Technical College
851 30th Ave SE
Rochester, MN 55904




-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://theatrical.net/pipermail/stagecraft_theatrical.net/attachments/20170216/6953388d/attachment.html>