Russ Posted January 15, 2015 Share Posted January 15, 2015 Hi - just introducing myself. I will much more likely be a 'lurker' than a poster but find this to be an interesting site. I'm not in vending anymore but have an extensive past at it. My dad's friends got him into it as a family business starting in 1969. In 1971 I was 14 and got my first vending machine, a can pop vendor at a small factory where he also had coffee and snacks. Pepsi cost $2.40 a case and I sold it for 20 cents a can. In summer I took in over $100 a week and half of it was gross profit. Figure $50 a week then was worth almost $300 now, not a bad profit for two trips to fill one pop machine. It was a Choice Vend CV-374. My dad had a small number of accounts, the largest two had an attendant part time to keep the machines filled over the lunch rush. His large accounts had both hot and cold food, one had ice cream. Over several years we got donuts and rolls from both local bakeries and a larger bakery which we would wrap and seal on a hot plate to put into the machines that same morning. My best account was a small place (Burroughs Corporation, now changed hands or OOB) with a Seeburg Marquee III hot drinks fresh brew machine, a vendo snack and a big can vendor supplied by Pepsi. I took $200-$250 a week out of those three machines with 15 cent candy, 25 cent pop, and 15 or 20 cent coffee. I paid $75 cash commission per month to the manager. When they expanded the place and brought in a lot more people they decided that a kid with a station wagon wasn't suitable for full line vending (though I did a great job) and I lost the account. I was easily clearing $60-75 a week profit there, nowadays equal to $425, for two or three trips there. Not bad pay for 4 or 5 hours and 20 or 30 miles of driving. I had some other accounts over the years but never got up to critical mass. After losing another my small accounts (for being a kid with a station wagon) and when my dad sold off his business I got out at that point too when one of my vending accounts hired me because they could see I was a hard worker. Later on I did have one cigarette machine at a local truck stop that made me really good money - I'd stop in on Saturday morning, take an order for the cigs I needed, buy them at the local drugstore - their prices were the same as at the vendor supply anyhow - I'd pay the truck stop owner his commission out of the coin box and fill the machine. I could make $40 or $50 clear for maybe an hour's work and two miles driving. Even now that's more than worthwhile I think. When my dad sold out of his business he went to work for the friends who had helped him start in vending half a dozen years earlier and as I said, I sold out then too. I started working for a major company which at the time ran all the Oasis restaurants on the Illinois Tollway and did the vendin as well, at the restaurants and gas stations. We had can pop, candy/snack/chips, cigarettes, canned juice, and freeze dried coffee vendors. Three of the oasis locations were staffed with 40 hr attendants and the rest were filled by two routemen driving a big truck. (Three of us in summer, the busiest season.) We worked Mon, Tues, Thurs, Fri, and about half a day Saturday. With some OT I could clear $280 a week in '78, worth close to $1000 now. We had no cold foods, no donuts, no milk, almost no spoilage, no racing to fill machines in time for shift changes or lunch breaks, it was great. We worked hard but we had a blast at work every day. I went from routeman to mechanic and then assistant manager. Eventually the contract expired and I accepted a job transfer to the Northeast where I supervised the full line vending at a manufacturing site with 15 or 20 buildings and 7500 employees. I learned a lot but it was nowhere near as easy or fun as it had been working on the toll road, that's for sure. Eventually I got into working with the computer systems we began using and to cut to the chase, I became a systems analyst, something I do today in a non-vending industry (healthcare). I've seen and worked with equipment most of you guys never have or will (probably a lucky things for you). Hot n Cold Visi Vends, Vendo Batch Brew coffee, post mix pop, and the worst by far of all, the Moyer Diebel cold food machines my company started with when we got the contract that transferred me to the Northeast to the mfg plant vending. Those Moyer Diebel were awful and I can't even find a refernce to them on the Internet anyplace let along a picture of them. They were made in Europe, that's all I know about them but they do bear some resemblance to one machine I see now. We managed to get them all taken back and credit towards Rowe 448's with which we replaced them. You haven't lived til you service a Vendo Batch Brew coffee vendor that gives you a giant bucket filled with empty coffee cans, coffee grounds and slop all mixed together that you have to deal with. In the old days someone could buy a cup of hot chocolate and press 'extra cream and sugar' which of course didn't go into the cocoa but into the mixing bowl for the coffee, almost guaranteeing a blockage as well as polluting someone's coffee with things they didn't want in it to start with. And I could never understand why Vendo made their hot and cold VisiVend with the hot part on the bottom and the cold part on the top, when the two different temperatures were trying to each work their way into the other portion of the machine. I don't know what those weighed but it was a lot. And I've done far more than my share of moving vending machines, sometimes by myself, sometimes with others going up flights of stairs - craziness. Back in about 1970 when I was a kid my dad had a Vendo pamphlet that folded out and showed their full line of vendors (a very basic listing). Somehow it got lost and I wrote a letter to Vendo asking if they could send me another. Some nice fellow there got my letter and sent me not a pamphlet but a huge binder with an expandable back, and hundreds of pages of literature for everything they made, all their parts offerings, a history of vending, I don't know what all else but it was huge and heavy. The covers have metal hinges. I added my other vending machine literature to it from the time, including more machines I'd never seen as well as some my dad or I had owned, and it's quite a book. I still have it; I guess what it is worth wouldn't be worth parting with it for but I sure do have a lot of brochures, service manuals, price lists for some things, probably impossible to locate or duplicate anymore. Some may be unique. When I started in vending in my dad's business we could buy a box of 20 rolls of LifeSavers for 59 cents. We sold sell them for a nickel a roll and the two cent profit was worthwhile. I remember when the price of candy went from 10 cents for everything to 15 cents for the more expensive brands like M&M Mars, Hershey and Nestlé. The vendor supply house had a whole section set up with "15 cent candy" to separate it from the 10 cent candy. We sold potato chips for 10 or 15 cents a bag for brand name chips, milk was 15 cents a carton, coffee a dime or 15 cents, post mix pop was 10 cents a 9 oz cup, saltine crackers a nickel, Campbell soup (sold hot in the can) for 25 cents and hot foods like Hormel and Chef Boy Ar Dee for 35 cents. I bought a brand new 1974 Ford Econoline E300 for $3600 for my business, what a price for an 8000 pound GVW van. Our first ovens were not microwave but infra-red, and what a mess to clean THOSE things. I'm not in vending anymore, left my last vending company job 23 years ago, but altogether I spent most of a 22 year period involved in the business. I don't think it could ever approach the way it used to be when we could sell cigarettes for 35 cents a pack (!), run a business out of our garage, and work 10 or 15 hours a week for full-time money! I wish all you guys good luck with your businesses and will enjoy reading what sort of issues and equipment you deal with in this business nowadays. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
caserri Posted January 16, 2015 Share Posted January 16, 2015 Fascinating! I would love to hear more. Feel free to post anytime. Welcome to TVF. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
orsd Posted January 16, 2015 Share Posted January 16, 2015 and thus a rivalry with azvendor was formed... anyway, nowadays cup soda and coffee have gone the way of the dodo bird, vendo is japanese, crane is fing up most major brands, newer players like royal and AMS have come and whopped the otheres asses, esp royal. oh, and Obama is g o l p h e r ing everything up, as well as other bureaucrats Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Russ Posted January 16, 2015 Author Share Posted January 16, 2015 Thanks for the nice comments and welcome. I've thought of a couple other bits of vending history trivia I'd like to share. I don't know if the NAMA (National Automatic Merchandising Assn) still exists or puts on a big show but back in '70 or so I went to their big vending show in Chicago. Of course McCormick Place was filled with vending equipment, commissary equipment, catering trucks, machine moving equipment, probably a few pinball type games also, not to mention tons of candy / snack and all other kinds of products to sample. What I recall most however was the people from the tobacco companies passing out free packs of cigarettes to anyone and everyone. I was 14 and looked it, no more, and they were all offering me packs of smokes which they politely inserted into those milky plastic cases used to keep them dry in the rain etc. Giving cigs to kids! Well I didn't smoke at the time and gave the cigs to my older brother. Vending is a tough business because people think anything with a coin slot is making you rich. An account with 25 people will tell you to put in an ice cream vendor because 'you will get rich'. Same thing goes for sandwiches and anything else with short shelf lives and low margins. I can see cup soda going 'the way of the dodo bird' since there are so many options to get cold drinks in sealed packaging, and no post mix machine can possibly offer more than half a dozen flavors. Coffee however, I would still expect some market for that, if the coffee is any good anyhow. I'm not a coffee drinker but my dad used to swear that fresh brewed coffee from one of his Seeburg single-cup machines was very good. Somewhere I know I have literature for one or two models of combination hot and cold (coffee, and post-mix soda) vending machines. Any such machines still existing belong in a museum! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
moondog Posted January 16, 2015 Share Posted January 16, 2015 Thanks for the nice comments and welcome. I've thought of a couple other bits of vending history trivia I'd like to share. I don't know if the NAMA (National Automatic Merchandising Assn) still exists or puts on a big show but back in '70 or so I went to their big vending show in Chicago. Of course McCormick Place was filled with vending equipment, commissary equipment, catering trucks, machine moving equipment, probably a few pinball type games also, not to mention tons of candy / snack and all other kinds of products to sample. What I recall most however was the people from the tobacco companies passing out free packs of cigarettes to anyone and everyone. I was 14 and looked it, no more, and they were all offering me packs of smokes which they politely inserted into those milky plastic cases used to keep them dry in the rain etc. Giving cigs to kids! Well I didn't smoke at the time and gave the cigs to my older brother. Vending is a tough business because people think anything with a coin slot is making you rich. An account with 25 people will tell you to put in an ice cream vendor because 'you will get rich'. Same thing goes for sandwiches and anything else with short shelf lives and low margins. I can see cup soda going 'the way of the dodo bird' since there are so many options to get cold drinks in sealed packaging, and no post mix machine can possibly offer more than half a dozen flavors. Coffee however, I would still expect some market for that, if the coffee is any good anyhow. I'm not a coffee drinker but my dad used to swear that fresh brewed coffee from one of his Seeburg single-cup machines was very good. Somewhere I know I have literature for one or two models of combination hot and cold (coffee, and post-mix soda) vending machines. Any such machines still existing belong in a museum! You nailed it with those 25 person accounts still wanting all kinds of equipment that would never pay for itself in their location - I guess some things never change. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
antoniocinisi Posted January 16, 2015 Share Posted January 16, 2015 Good read russ! I have to disagree with youon one point. Five Guys Burgers and Fries has a soda machine that can do over a hundred flavors. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jerrybrooks vending Posted January 17, 2015 Share Posted January 17, 2015 I had a moyer diebel coffee machine once...plugged it in and it caught fire! Sent from my Ally using Tapatalk 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Russ Posted January 17, 2015 Author Share Posted January 17, 2015 Well, the machine at Five Guys is probably designed to cater to that fad kids have of mixing flavors of soda together. (Even my wife does that, no thanks.) But the days of the old postmix machines are numbered for sure now that you can buy water, flavored water, sport drinks, regular and diet sodas plus other things all from one machine vending cans or bottles. The Moyer Diebel food machines we had were nightmares. Every shelf was loaded with one blank space. The customer would shop the machine around to find the thing they wanted and get it next to the door opening area. They'd put in their money, enter their selection, and their item would come to the vend area while the other shelves rotated the blank space there; they'd push open the large stainless door and the only shelf with an item they could get was the one they bought. What nightmares these machines were! Some people just had some sort of a fetish when they 'shopped' it to hit the 'shop' button repeatedly, and every time the machine 'shopped' just one space it did so rather violently. With these customers hammering at the button and the machine shopping so violently it knocked things out ot their places and off the back side of the stack of shelves (or platters, I guess you'd call them). Cha CHUNK! Cha CHUNK! Cha CHUNK! That used to annoy the heck out of me hearing that as someone agitated the contents of the food machine. One nice problem they had was that the coin slot on the front of the machine couldn't be blocked and would accept a half-dollar coin, but the chute quickly narrowed to be too small for the 50 cent piece to get through it, and would jam up all the money deposited after it. Disassembling the machine door to get at the coin chute was a real pain, too. My company went cheap buying those Moyer Diebel machines and we regretted it big time. Another cheapskate thing my company did, remember this was in the era when bill accepters were just becoming common, they didn't want to put a bill changer at every vending bank and not all the machines accepted bills, so the idea was that a customer could put a single into a snack machine which did have a bill accepter, then hit the coin return and get change paid out instead of the bill back. Talk about a hokey arrangement and of course the snack machines often ran out of change. One thing where I'm kicking myself, I had a couple of pieces of equipment that I let go and wish I hadn't. I had an old Coca Cola slant shelf bottle vendor in good shape, I got it from the local Coke bottler when they pulled out the last of their bottle equipment and were just going to junk them all. I gave it away before I moved 900 miles some years ago, and wish I'd kept it. Then there's the cocktail table Zaxxon game I sold at a flea market for $50 or so, and it worked like a charm - it would have been nice also to keep. Well I wish you guys all the best of luck with your businesses. I'm sure the landscape and economy are very different from back when I was in the business. Thanks for letting me reminisce and I hope some of you have enjoyed a look at vending back in the old days. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AZVendor Posted January 17, 2015 Share Posted January 17, 2015 Hey Russ, This is a nice "stumble" down memory lane! It really brings back the fond memories of my first years in vending. I'll bet your Vendo snacks were the cable driven Snackmarts; what a pain those were but I could keep them working. I was lucky that the batch brew coffee machines were gone by the time I started but I vividly remember the MD coffee machines. They also made cold cup and snack machines, too. I think the MD food machine later became the National FM72 as the violent vending action and the tall stainless door that was pushed open to access the food was the same between them. Remember the key-opened back panels on those left over from the days when banks of vending machines were set into a wall and the food machine could be restocked from the rear as people were using it? I also remember the Vendo Visi-Vend cold and frozen machines. I will say though that perhaps the strangest machine I have seen was the drum-style Rowe full size snack machine. It had a full sized cabinet with a vertical rotating drum inside filled with snacks. The drum rotated to dispense the item you selected into the delivery bin. Rowe apparently had a fetish for that design as it was later used in the countertop Rowe 499 snack machine. Ah, good times. We were truly in the vending heyday before it began declining in the early 2000s, weren't we? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Russ Posted January 17, 2015 Author Share Posted January 17, 2015 You nailed it with those 25 person accounts still wanting all kinds of equipment that would never pay for itself in their location - I guess some things never change Sometimes only one of the machines there even makes the others worth having, like a stop that buys a lot of coffee, you humor them with a snack vendor to keep the coffee there but when they start asking about sandwiches, no way. One more thing on that subject, a real pet peeve of mine and my dad's... we'd get to a smaller or medium sized account with the morning's donuts and cold foods and find them setting up for a going away party or birthday party for some employee, with everyone bringing in food and cake and usually a coffee urn... nobody bothered to tell US of course and the sandwiches and donuts intended for that location were as good as wasted. If someone would have just thought to tell us 'Thursday is Muriel's retirement so we will be putting on a party' we could have reduced the food and donut orders for that location by 80% for the day instead of buying it to throw it out, grrr. Even today it might be a very good thing to put a bug in someone's ear at such locations, 'please let us know if you are having any special events that will affect the food sales so we can avoid over-ordering for that day'. When a little guy like my dad is struggling to run a small show like he was, it was a bit disappointing that people would not tip him off and save him from ending up with $20 in waste for no good reason. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Russ Posted January 17, 2015 Author Share Posted January 17, 2015 Hey AZVendor, I'm glad some of my stories rang a bell with you. Actually our first snacks were drop-shelf Vendos, sometimes up to 79" tall (to match the rest of the bank of machines of course). They had a mechanical coin mech that was an amazing contraption. None of the change tubes were self-filling, you had to do that. One of my dad's first Vendos had a special column on the right side that actually displayed the item you would get; when you bought it, the whole little display area did a backflip and the next item to drop down from the next drop shelf landed back in the little display area when it rotated back. I'd forgotten about that little feature and I never saw it on another machine we had. Our next snack machines were AP candyshops and LektroVends, quite antique today I'm sure but still decades removed from those old Vendos that had been around forever, starting out with little machines that had mirrors on the front - you see those in old movies sometimes. The FM72 does bear a striking resemblance to those Moyer Diebel food machines. I think the MD model number was SM50Z; it doesn't seem to exist anyplace even on the Internet anymore. I wish I'd saved some of the documentation for my big binder that guy from Vendo sent me 45 years ago. (Just for grins I put that big old binder on my postal scale, it weighs 12 3/4 pounds and I'll bet 90% of what is in it may be unique by now.) and thus a rivalry with azvendor was formed...anyway, nowadays cup soda and coffee have gone the way of the dodo bird, vendo is japanese, crane is fing up most major brands, newer players like royal and AMS have come and whopped the otheres asses, esp royal.oh, and Obama is g o l p h e r ing everything up, as well as other bureaucrats I gather AZVendor is another guy with a past going back to vending in the 'old days'? No rivalry needed, I always enjoy a trip back through time with someone who's seen some of the same things. I totally agree with you about O and the bureaucrats making a mess of things. Even local governments used to cause us problems making us buy stickers to put on our vending machines, many of which didn't make a lot of money and her comes city hall telling us we needed to buy stickers for them. Part of that 'anything with a coin slot is a goldmine' mentality the public seems to have. Speaking of bureaucrats, my old man got the contract to put vending machines in an all new city hall of a pretty wealthy suburb of Chicago. Lots of people and the public. He put in all new equipment, maybe 5 or 6 machines, bolted together and very nice. Looked like a great account but the sales were terrible. In a week the whole account was doing less business than just one machine should have been doing. I forget the particulars but the upshot was that the area was being kept locked most hours of the day so only the employees could access it except during certain times, and while it was right off of a public hallway, they couldn't access it at all. Long story short my dad got tired of making payments on machines that were collecting dust and could not get them to change whatever logic it was that had them keeping the area locked. When they came to him and said 'you have to buy stickers to put on these machines, we forgot to tell you that' he politely told them to get another vendor. I still remember as he and I removed all those machines by ourselves, some schmuck in a suit standing nearby muttering that it was 'not fair' that we were takiing out the machines. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Russ Posted January 17, 2015 Author Share Posted January 17, 2015 Hey Russ, Remember the key-opened back panels on those left over from the days when banks of vending machines were set into a wall and the food machine could be restocked from the rear as people were using it? I also remember the Vendo Visi-Vend cold and frozen machines. I will say though that perhaps the strangest machine I have seen was the drum-style Rowe full size snack machine. It had a full sized cabinet with a vertical rotating drum inside filled with snacks. The drum rotated to dispense the item you selected into the delivery bin. Rowe apparently had a fetish for that design as it was later used in the countertop Rowe 499 snack machine. Ah, good times. We were truly in the vending heyday before it began declining in the early 2000s, weren't we? I forgot to include this... I do remember the old machines with access from the back side via another door. We had at least a couple of VisiVends that had that. You probably worked on VisiVends; remember that mechanical nightmare that was behind the left access door on the front? If I was wealthy I think I'd set up a bank of that old equipment in a room in my house. I can't imagine the power drawn by a hot and cold Visi Vend! Re that Rowe snack machine, that is the same system LektroVend used and so did AP with their Candyshop / Snackshop vendors. I've got literature for all of those including parts and repair manuals for the LV machines. My dad acquired some of the AP machines when he took over his largest account. (It actually had two banks of equipment, one full line up in the lunchroom and a smaller bank down on the factory floor.) We also had a number of the LektroVends which were the first candy/snacks we got after the ancient Vendo drop-shelf machines. There was a bit of a knack needed to filling those machines because you needed to be sure you had the stuff right side up when it got to the front. LektroVend had a shiny metal 'mirror' above the rotating drum (magazine, whatever) so you could see that the spaces at the top had product inserted in them. My favorite snack machines of all time at least from the routeman's perspective had to be the Nationals we used on the Illinois toll road. I forget the model number and can't believe I didn't grab any of the manuals as I had them all once upon a time. They were FIFO machines but they had displays on the front (I never minded maintaining those really). Inside were shelves that swing out so you could fill them all basically from above; the customer didn't see the actual products so as long as it was put into the spirals neatly enough to vend that was all you needed. I could slap a handful of cheese crackers or twizzlers or Milky Ways down and into place like nobody's business. Even with swapping out an occasional display they were easily the fastest snack machines I ever had to fill. I would open the door, prop my box of snacks on the delivery tray, swing out the shelves and start filling them. Those machines were real workhorses. I left my last vending job (actually was an assistant manager and doing corporate computer work, though sometimes involved in the vending) 24 years ago now. Even so I spent 21 years involved invending so there's a lot of it in my head. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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