Time to move beyond ‘clean, filled and working’

We have an almost perfect toolkit – telemetry. We can, with remote monitoring, watch sales as they occur. We can be attentive to out-of-stocks before they occur. And do it with hot shot runs to refill a few spirals. How do we do that? Get rid of your slowest selling SKUs. Then double up and even triple up on best selling SKUs. What sells best will vary dramatically at our locations. So be smart and be flexible. Other vending channel research we’ve seen (from Europe) indicates that profit can increase dramatically when you do double up or triple up on the best selling SKUs.

Differentiating What We Offer

In vending, onsite feeding and OCS, we’ve heard about sales being down by 10 percent or more. Our tried and true practices are not delivering the same results we achieved in the past. We can blame the economy. But blame does not pay the bills. We can blame the competition. But their efforts to steal our sales will only continue to intensify in 2011.

If we follow the example set by fast food restaurants and convenience stores, we would use food – foodservice – to be our primary point of differentiation.  That would be a challenging initiative for any company in our industry.