“Unattended Retail” on the Upswing

“Unattended retail” – i.e., vending machines – is a growing phenomenon, a recent article in Slate notes, becoming a staple in airports, hotels, factories, schools, bars and museums. And what such machines sell is diversifying, too.

“While we’ve come to associate these appliances with a pretty generic assortment of products—chips, Coke, the occasional stick of gum—their edible offerings have expanded to salads, cheese, and even acai bowls,” Hannah Docter-Loeb writes. “Beyond food, their options run the gamut of commercial goods: iPads, Plan B, Narcan and actual bullets.”

Helping accelerate that growth is the proliferation of electronic payment systems, which means that you can pay for an item with whatever you have in your pocket, Michael Kasavana, a professor emeritus at Michigan State University’s School of Hospitality Business, told Docter-Loeb.

Beyond upgrades in the payment experience, the machines can also offer way more products. Most traditional vending machines could hold between 40 and 45 products, Kasavana said, but by compartmentalizing and integrating digital screens to show their inventory—rather than the rows of products—machines can offer about twice as many items.

This digitization has also helped keep some of the machines’ more expensive offerings safe from theft. The digital screens allow them to be stored more securely within the machine itself.

“Gone are the days when vending machines were simple coin-operated snack dispensers,” Dave Berman, a co-founder of the U.K. vending-machine service company VendEase told the Slate writer. “Today they are smart, data-driven, and far more capable of maximizing revenue while improving the customer experience.”

He has the numbers back that up. According to a report from the NAMA Foundation, the association representing the convenience services industry, while the total number of vending machines has gone down over the past five years, the sales per machine have increased substantially.

Click here to see the full Slate article.