A teacher I had in grade-school had a little wooden sign on the wall by the other inspirational posters. It read "Sometimes not getting what you want is a great stroke of luck".

Well, as a kid that didn't make much sense to me- if I wanted it, or had planned it and it fell apart, my first recourse was usually panic, followed by devastation. Cliche as it sounds, I think this is one of those things you just don't get until you get older. I think some people out there never learned this lesson. Some things you find later would have been disasters, or horrible missteps, or a better option presented itself- whatever the case was, I was glad I had "dodged a bullet" each time.

I had no idea this would apply to vending so many times.


My first brush with this was when I won a buy-it-now auction off of eBay last summer. At the time I had two candy triples making me a little money in front of my fathers miniature golf/concession stand thing, and I wanted something with more "oomph". My rationale was that if three canisters were good, eight would be immensely better. My plans were set- I'd stock it with whatever I could think of, and the quarters would rain down on me. Then, to my horror, the seller disappeared. I couldn't contact him, there was no communication, and the worst part was he got my money. This meant that until eBay refunded me or I worked some more, my vending plans were on hold. This was a huge blow to my operations at the time. Four months later, eBay buyer protection and PayPal finally refunded me. However, winter had set in and I had more machines in storage than out on the beat, so I called it quits on that until spring.

However, fast forward to groundhog day 2012, and I found a cool website, where one "JLM" was having a horrible time with his U-Turns. Page after page of horrors all archived forever for all to see, and I decided then and there that an 8-way anything was out of the question. Now, had the U-Turn shipped, I doubt things would have been wildly different for me. But, it was one more instance in which my plans had failed, but I had come out better for it.

I could fill Mr. Caserri's servers to the top with other instances large and small that I've run into, but instead I'll leave you with this:

Next time your plans explode, your deals fall apart or a machine breaks down- believe it or not you might just be very lucky.

Good luck to all of you out there on your routes!

Alex Macomber, Performa Vending