Orkin - A creditor that occasionally sprays something.

[AndrewF]

Orkin - A creditor that occasionally sprays something.

As I pointed out in another thread, my grandparents had Orkin spraying for ants back in the 1990s.

Orkin never destroyed the colony, they just sprayed ants that were visible and some cracks and crevices.

My grandparents kept paying for Orkin, but they always had ants.

In 2016, I had an apartment in Chicago that had ants. I went to the hardware store, bought some Terro bait stations, and left them by the kitchen window. These things let the ants (which are social feeders) take the poison back and share it with others, eventually it kills the queen and most of the drones and the colony will collapse, for maybe $10-20 at most.

But later on, several apartments later, my landlord sold the building I liked living in, where rent was reasonable, to a slumlord hiding behind a web of overleveraged LLCs.

This new landlord let everything go to Hell. He started moving in tenants with no screening, he eventually averaged an eviction every 2-3 months in a building with 27 units, legal fees costing about $1300 and missed rent averaging approximately $3,000-5,000 per tenant, but I saw one case where it got over $8,000. The guy moved in and paid once and never paid again and it took over 8 months to remove him.

The landlord was so stretched (due to constant cash-out refis, he had no equity on anything and was essentially a property manager for his lenders, with no margin for tenants that didn't pay, and without enough sense to screen them for $50 to avoid a $6000-8000 disaster every few months) that basic upkeep was totally out of the question. Windows got broken out in some units, he made people live in them without windows for months, the toilets broke down in the whole building and the only reason it got fixed was because I went to the city, instead of fixing the toilets immediately and treating it like an emergency, he got on Air India, and when the city started sending fines to his wife, he got on Zoom and started yelling at his superintendant to get the plumber.

Dumpsters overflowed. Dirt and detritis from not mopping the hallways.

Eventually millions of German and American roaches took over the building. And while I was treating  my apartment with various things including Ortho, boric acid powder, and sticky traps, and zapping hundreds with an electric swatter, nothing ever seemed to do anything but slow them down.

When we moved, we moved into an apartment owned by the landlord that sold the first place. This new place had German roaches, but the landlord was at least "managing" it with boric acid and sticky traps, basically doing the least he could. When tenants moved out he'd toss boric acid powder all over everything including the cupboards. When I moved in I thought someone spilled sugar, I later saw dead cockroaches, and decided to call Orkin.

Orkin advertised a coupon that got you the first spraying pretty cheap. But that spraying came with a one year "contract".

I signed it because I was going to need shoulder surgery and didn't want roaches crawling all over me.

After about 6-7 months of still catching the occasional roach or two in my sticky trap minefields (esp under the water heater), I started using the "Orkin Guarantee" every time I saw a roach. Even one. I was like "This is ridiculous. Why am I paying $53 a month and still seeing roaches?"

They would come out, spray some deltamethrin, replace some sticky traps. Probably $2-3 worth of stuff, bill me $53 that month and come again in two months. Well, I started invoking that Guarantee almost every week.

They never guarantee the roaches will be gone. They never guarantee that they'll let you out of your contract if there are still roaches months in. They only guarantee that they'll come back if you complain and that they might refund one month's service fee here and there.

They have a product that works better in the truck, called Tekko IGR (Insect Growth Regulator), but the technicians don't spray it until you're becoming such a pest to them that it becomes cheaper to solve the problem than manage you.

I can't imagine that the techs don't know that Tekko works better. "Anthony" told me it did, but had no answer for "Why weren't we using this already?"

When I moved, I treated my apartment myself and canceled Orkin. Then they billed my Chase debit card again a month later and said that "That was for May."

I completely drained my Chase checking that I opened earlier this year for the new account bonus by paying off some credit cards. Then when it was at $0, I called Chase and closed the account. I imagine that if I did not, then Orkin would have still tried billing it every month and "we'll look into that".

I've since seen local exterminators on Reddit say they laugh when they get all the people who are paying Orkin or Terminix calling them because it's not working.

All I can say is if the customer still sees the odd cockroach, they're likely to keep paying, if the infestation has been destroyed because the breeding cycle was stopped, they might cancel.

I moved and there's no evidence of roaches here. I sprayed the baseboards and entrances and the drain pipes and stuff, and set out sticky traps, boxed, and flat under the kitchen appliances. 

My opinion of Orkin is very low. I've essentially told a contractor they're fired and I took over the work myself.

Deltamethrin spray is cheap. You can buy bottles of it sold under the RAID brand for about $5.87 each at Walmart and it's enough to treat your whole apartment. You don't have to reapply for about 4-5 months. You can do the level of service you'll get out of Orkin for $10 a year or pay Orkin over $600.

What's worse, is that Orkin has a finance arm (which I didn't go through) called "Rollins Acceptance Corp". Acceptance in the name, in my experience, is the warning you don't want to go near a finance company.

Orkin was always texting me wanting to do more spraying. I was like "I'm not even seeing that, why don't we worry about the roaches you're not wiping out?" And it was all automated and for some astronomical price. And all you had to do was reply "Y". Yikes.

They also do insulation, and caulking, but from the invoices I've seen you're better off having the work done by someone else, or DIY.

[FicoMike0]

Wow @AndrewF 

You sure seem to attract trouble and abuse, lol. I wouldn't want to stand near you in a thunderstorm. 

Deltamethrin, huh? The only bugs I've seen this year have been flies. I have a concentrate with gamma Cyhalothrin as the active ingredient. I sprayed a gallon of it around the backyard and deck. Killed most of the flies. It kills ants to. Spectracide claims it will kill about everything but me.

[AndrewF]

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@FicoMike0 wrote:

Wow @AndrewF 

You sure seem to attract trouble and abuse, lol. I wouldn't want to stand near you in a thunderstorm. 

Deltamethrin, huh? The only bugs I've seen this year have been flies. I have a concentrate with gamma Cyhalothrin as the active ingredient. I sprayed a gallon of it around the backyard and deck. Killed most of the flies. It kills ants to. Spectracide claims it will kill about everything but me.

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Yeah, Deltamethrin is a "knock down" and "barrier" defense tactic. It won't deal with a severe roach infestation by itself, but it's a cheap preventative that can stop an infestation from neighboring apartments if the building isn't already in a horrible state.

The sticky traps are a good pairing, not because they'll ever solve the issue by themselves, but they alert you if there is bug activity. They'll catch anything that runs through the trap, and that includes spiders, centipedes, earwigs, and other stuff that's not just roaches. It will tell you what the problem actually is. 

Any roaches they do catch is one less roach that can get pregnant or find something to mate with, so it could potentially stop a pregnant German Roach from creating as many as 60 new roaches per breeding cycle. One of them that I caught in my "minefield" in the utility room at the last apartment was a female German with an egg sack (oothecae).

The goal is to monitor and prevent right here, right now, and further treatment only becomes necessary if they start appearing in my traps despite the spray.

Only target high risk areas for the spray. Do not get the spray near cooking surfaces. Do not let people or animals back into the room where you sprayed the baseboards until the spray dries.

Deltamethrin is a synthetic version of an insecticide made from Chrysanthemums, when the spray dries it leaves these "crystals" that form a barrier. If an insect touches that stuff, it's dead already, but at the appropriate dilution it's not extremely hazardous to mammals, but the bottles carry another warning. Any fish that get near it will die, so don't spray near an aquarium.

Roaches are some of the worst pests, the German Roach is the worst of the bunch because of an insanely fast breeding cycle.

If you're dealing with an established infestation you're going to have to switch gears and add something like Tekko IGR. It's a professional grade product, but you can buy it over the counter from places like Amazon.

There's also bait traps, those don't work very well unless the infestation is so severe that they're desperate for food. Advion Cockroach works a bit better.

Roaches are cannibalistic and they feed each other, so if you can poison one, then you might end up killing up to 72 others that either share food with it or eat it after it crawls back into the wall and dies.

It's just like the Sky Marshall in Starship Troopers said.

To defeat the bug, we must understand the bug!

I remember my dad, over 20 years ago, dealing with an invasive species in his backyard call the Japanese Beetle. He deployed traps that were catching thousands of them.

The idea is you want to be catching and killing them so quickly that their reproduction rate can't overcome what you're doing to them.

It's like a disease really, where the R rate has to be <1 in order to eventually wipe something out, but the higher the R number, the faster it spreads.

Measles with no vaccine has an R 14, for example. That means that every person who gets it will spread it to 14 others, if the population isn't vaccinated. If you can get 95% of the population vaccinated, you eradicate it from that population. Fall below 90% , it gets moving pretty fast again.

The German Roach can breed so fast that an established infestation can't be eradicated with unless you stop the breeding cycle entirely.

If you spray deltamethrin and then you start seeing dead roaches all over your floor later, it means that there's thousands of them in the walls. 

More of them are dying in the walls.

Ideally you see clean traps and zero roaches coming out of the walls an dying on the floor.

[Realist]

I hired Orkin for a wasp/bee issue.  Paid whatever resonable price they asked, and they came out three times until the colony ended up dead, dead, and dead.

Haven't needed them since.

[AndrewF]

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@Realist wrote:

I hired Orkin for a wasp/bee issue.  Paid whatever resonable price they asked, and they came out three times until the colony ended up dead, dead, and dead.

Haven't needed them since.

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I'm glad they reached an endpoint with you. My impression from their dealing with a German Roach infestation was that they'll do a quick baseboard spray with something you could get yourself at Walmart for $6, replace a couple sticky traps ($1), and thn be out of the building in 15 minutes.

German Roaches are like the Measles of roaches. The Measles spreads so fast that if you vaccinate 95% of the population it's gone, but if you only do 90%, it's back. The apartments around you and the crappy landlord that doesn't do anything about the building are like all the countries that never got rid of Measles. If your vaccination drops to 90%, you go from local eradication, to pocketed outbreaks.

Everyone sort of off doing their own thing ensures that if one apartment steps up their game and suppresses them, there will still be visitors from other apartments ready to step in and set off a full blown infestation again if that unit drops their guard.

Their semi-monthly service will keep the roaches down just enough to avoid a visible catastrophe, but not enough to kill them.

Once I learned what the exterminators were doing I've just been doing a version of it myself in the new apartment, stepping up my bait to Advion Arenas.

I learned my lesson and I learned it well from two apartments ago. Just because you don't have them (or see them) now doesn't mean anything. Any landlord can run in there after the last person moves out, dust with roach powder, spray piles of cockroaches with RAID, and toss a roach grenade in for good effect.

That makes the place "look good" and then that next tenant sees them again a couple months later and the landlord accuses them of bringing them in and says nobody else has been complaining.

The stuff in a spray can that Anthony from Orkin was using was functionally similar to a RAID product for gaps and cracks that comes with a WD-40 type straw on the can. You can clear out plates and small appliances in your kitchen and use the spray straw to target gaps and cracks behind the countertop yourself. I found a can of this stuff at Target for $10.

And you can also flip the spray straw down and use it as a contact killer by spraying a bug if you see one. They'll be dead in a few seconds.

With German Roaches, if you're not seeing or catching any (Catchmaster sticky traps all along the baseboards) it  means you're doing a good job. If you catch one every month or two, it means there's a wanderer from a neighbor, but your apartment is not heavily infested.

Really, it's called Integrated Pest Management because no one action will eliminate the entire population and prevent it from coming back.

It may not be that Orkin is terrible, but they're overpriced for a level of service you can do yourself much cheaper.

I wasn't impressed by Ortho Home Defense. When I was at that slum apartment building there were so many German Roaches crawing around in the hallways, I picked a test subject and hosed him down directly, and it didn't seem to mind.

The reason Ortho Home Defense doesn't do much to a German Roach and it's like hitting it with water. It's like "Thanks for the bath!" and walks off, is because cheap landlords and bad exterminators have been using the exact same watered down retail bifenthrin 0.05% spray on roaches in that building for decades and the ones that survive become immune. They develop knockdown resistance.

Orkin at least inadvertantly showed me what products still tend to work for knockdown. Deltamethrin is a much better knockdown spray for a perimeter. 

[AndrewF]

I emailed another pest control company that replied with this:

"For low to moderate activity, we offer a two-visit service with a 30-day satisfaction guarantee after the second treatment.

The service includes placing gel bait in your kitchen and bathrooms, treating cracks and crevices with material and dusting. We also will set up monitoring traps to track the level of activity.

Two weeks after our initial visit, we'll return for a follow-up service to ensure that the treatment is effective.

You will need to prepare for the treatment by clearing any open food sources and emptying your cabinets and drawers. It’s also important to cover items to protect them during the treatment.

The price for the 2-time roach service will be $395.

Thank you,"

This boils down to $800 an hour for:

Set up some sticky traps (retail 40 cents each)

Deploy gel bait (like Advion Cockroach or MGK Vendetta, which are both available on Amazon....enough to treat your entire apartment yourself runs about $25-30)

Spraying toxic insecticides _everywhere_ after making you do the unpaid physical labor of getting everything out of your kitchen and bathroom first.

Insecticides that may or may not even work, depending on whether the local roach population has knockdown resistance to that one, and whether the technician dilutes it properly. Too little, you don't do anything to the roaches, too much and it could hurt pets or people while the corporation hides behind a web of LLCs.

"Dusting" maybe some IGRs, but you can get IGR dust on Amazon too and do it yourself. Unlike pyrethroids, IGRs are usually not potentially highly toxic to pets and people as they target insect biology and stop the development of chiten, which is what composes the roach's exoskeleton.

You can apply all of this yourself and it will not come out to $800 in 10 years with the promise of a complimentary callback if you see a roach 30 days after the second visit.

Roaches and integrated pest management are an ongoing problem, not something that you get done and over with in two visits for $400.

What the customer is supposed to do is pay $400, see results, roaches come back, customer panics and asks how much the monthly subscription costs.

[AndrewF]

That guy in the building across the street from us that was complaining to management about cockroaches back in June got a notice taped to his door that says his unit has been selected for "pest control" and that "the level of cleanliness in your unit will be reported to Management" and threatening him with fines and other sanctions if his apartment is dirty or if he does not let them in.

This is exactly the problem I was talking about with toxic managers at work. When you bring a problem to their attention they'll be nice, to your face, and start building a case against you.

Tenant comes in complains of roaches, building management responds with a two day notice on the door threatening problems with the lease.

They knew all along that the building had a problem, but they don't see it that way, they see the complaining tenant as the problem to be worked, because tenants that complain to them eventually complain to government. If he's too busy responding to fines, lease violations and their lawyer filing an eviction, then he's not going to prioritize the cockroach issue anymore.

On the surface they have total deniability. They are enforcing the lease and doing pest control. Under the surface, that guy is the "pest". It's a counter-insurgency with plausible deniability,

That guy is in a Catch-22 now. He can refuse them entry and get a lease violation, or he can clean like crazy for two days (while he presumably has to go to work) and try to starve out their data gathering once he lets them in.

It's a cynical take, sure, but I know it works. I already know the playbook from dealing with supervisors and upper management at work, and I know what I would do if I was the management here and boxed in by government regulations that required me to take reasonable measures.

First they'll try to frame it as "the guy was living like a pig and infested his unit", and then they'll push him out, if they can't push him out, they'll send a cheap exterminator or the maintenence guy in to do the absolute bare minimum so they can say they did something, and the likely result will be to smack a hornet's nest and now six other units have roaches pouring out of the walls.

I feel that it's better to make an operational capital expense of $60 buying supplies to treat my apartment as if an active cockroach problem exists to head it off at the pass rather than asking people whose primary goal is managing risk and containing me to send anyone into my unit later.