This year’s NAMA OneShow was filled with optimism. As I walked around and talked to attendees, I got the sense that we’ve reached a turning point as an industry. Gone are the days when an operator would stop, and during our discussion about payment systems, say: “Cashless is stupid, these young people just need to learn to carry cash.” An operator actually did say this to me at one of my first tradeshows. Instead, operators filled the room at the V-engineering session to learn about the technological innovations in the vending industry. I spoke with a number of operators who came to the show to investigate telemetry units, the return on investment for cashless, micro market systems and several other vending industry...

Our industry is changing as micro markets take a bigger share of the deployments at locations we serve. Food has become even more important to those companies operating micro-markets. How many vending locations offer food versus only offering cold drinks and snacks? That snack lineup is usually limited to confections, salty snacks, cookies, crackers, gums, mints and, maybe, pastries. An excellent article from Convenience Store Decisions – posted through their daily email newsletter supports my point. The article explores how convenience store foodservice is adapting “to meet the latest food trends.” One critical data point popped out in the story Grab-and-Go Continues to Grow .  Market research about pricing, from a study by...

When someone sends me an email, the first thing I look for is how they spell my name. My married surname is difficult for newbie's, but if the writer took the time to double check, it automatically puts me in a better frame of mind and more open to whatever I'm about to read. The second piece is the name of the magazine. This isn't difficult for most people. The magazine has been Automatic Merchandiser for decades. Those words were in the title even when the magazine began. So when I received an email for an article submission and the name of the magazine was incorrect, I was a bit dismayed.  There were other problems as well, but I kept coming back to the name of the magazine. I couldn't help but think, if this were truly important to...

As day-to-day living becomes more and more technologically sound, businesses all around the world are racing to keep up with the demands of the consumer. More and more people want a product that dazzles them, something they’ve never seen before, something that they could only have dreamt about. Those dreams may be closer to a reality than we thought. Qualcomm unveiled a technologically advanced coffee service concept at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain. The concept featured an ordinary coffee maker made extraordinary with Qualcomm’s Atheros 4100 chip, making it a digital machine accessible wirelessly via a tablet or mobile device that can deliver personalized coffee drinks. Qualcomm featured two parts. The first used...