Good news everyone! You don’t need to move the drinks machine anymore. Hovo and I puttered about with network cables in the roof to relocate some to where it is now
Net effect, the drinks machine can stay there and will be joined by vendo.
Anyhow, back to Mike’s awesomeness.
So I acquired another 212 drinks this week. I managed to find Mt Dew at a reasonable price again, oh frabjous day! 
I also acquired a second sugarfree option, Diet Lemon. Our stash in the server room is now stocked up again.
The new order in the green room “cold drinks” machine:
Coca Cola
Mountain Dew
Lemon (20 or so Kirks Lemon, then all Lift)
Lemonade (Schweppes Lemonade)
RAND(); (random flavour and no two in a row should be the same, currently stocked with 8 different flavours, some of which aren’t available in any other line)
Ginger Ale (Kirks)
Pepsi Next (to be replaced by a fully sugarfree Cola option once this line is empty)
600mL Water bottles
The new order in the warehouse “Port-Hack Cola” machine:
600mL Water bottles
Orange (currently Fanta)
Ginger Beer (Kirks)
Pepsi
Creaming Soda (Kirks Candy)
Diet Lemon (Kirks)
This should do us for a few months. 
For those who like numbers - we currently go through around 70 cans a week, over a third is just Coke. Because I try to get really good sales prices, it averages out that every dollar I spend buying & loading up drinks earns the hackerspace between $1.65 & $2.50 depending on the flavour. Definitely worth the ROI for my time.
Important drinks announcement: some of our stock is in danger of expiring and we need to clear it out because no one drinks it. Because of this, Pepsi Next and regular Pepsi are on sale, 50 cents a can! We can’t change the price for individual lines on the vending machines, but come see me and I’ll reimburse you the difference (or I’ll just open the machine & give you a can for 50 cents straight away). Feel free to buy in bulk or grab extra to take home - in fact please do buy in bulk, because it all must go by the end of the month!
Also another 220 cans of soft drink were acquired for this week, mainly Coke & diet soft drinks. Yes the 216 cans of just Coke I purchased mid-July are all gone. We go through so much Coke.
Mountain Dew is about to be exhausted; it’s a popular drink but hard to find at a good price. A new flavour will replace it either this week or the next & the remaining Mt Dew stock will be placed pseudo-randomly in the Random line!
Small update so people know the status of the drinks machines… Thanks to @rut4ger the Pepsi Next has been depleted, and this line has been replaced by Coke Zero! Also due to availability issues, the Mountain Dew line has temporarily been swapped with Pasito. Mt Dew will return at some time in the future, but for now enjoy the new flavour!
Even moar drinks incoming, 264 pictured. Not pictured: 48 cans of Coke & 48 cans of Coke Zero, totalling 360 cans. We weren’t completely out of the 220 cans I bought 3 weeks ago but we were running low and it was a good sale price. We also have a new record: ~70 cans of just Coke and depleting the entire flavour line in under a week. In the words of Ronald Weasley, “bloody hell”. If this keeps up I might have to add a second line of Coke just to handle demand. 
Members might’ve noticed that the drinks machines haven’t been stocked as well as they used to be. The server room keys to the store room went missing and I didn’t have access to our stockpile to replenish the machines (skip it for just one week and four lines run out…). The lock to the store room has been replaced, a few hundred more drinks were purchased and both machines have been stocked up once again… and with the empty lines, this is also a convenient time to change around the flavours on offer!
Current stock in the green room “cold drinks” machine:
Coca Cola
Ginger Beer (Kirks)
Lift
Lemonade (Schweppes)
RAND(); (random flavour and no two in a row should be the same, currently stocked with 7 different flavours, some of which aren’t available in any other line)
Raspberry (Kirks)
Coke Zero
Water 600mL bottle
Current stock in the warehouse “Port-Hack Cola” machine:
Water 600mL bottle
Orange (Fanta)
Mountain Dew
Pepsi
Ginger Ale (Kirks)
Diet Lemon (Kirks)
Additionally, the green room “cold drinks” machine has had its interior thoroughly cleaned, the seals freshened, condenser and evaporator fins dusted and the condensation drain repaired. All of this will reduce this machine’s power consumption by perhaps 30%… So I’ve decided to lower the thermostat in this machine a little bit to make them more enticing on a hot summer day. The cold drinks are now slightly colder!
I’m not currently responsible for the drinks machines any more, but I have learned a few things from doing the job over the past year. I thought I should document these nuggets of information somewhere so they’re not lost forever, and right here is as good as anywhere! This will be a little long and most people can skip over this.
Loading & general maintenance tips
Buying drinks
Making hackers happy & improving sales
There’s a lot of psychology behind increasing drink sales and Coke, Pepsi etc have some guides but I’m too lazy to find & link them right now. Suffice to say, from my own experimentation I found that taking these things into account actually noticeably improved sales. So consider the below as pretty solid advice that I tested and found true for us, not generic advice, nor my personal biased preferences or anything like that.
Pepsi products don’t sell. Don’t buy them, no matter how tempting their lower price may be, they just don’t get bought. Schweppes products too. They will sit around for a year until they expire. With the exceptions of green Lime Solo, Mountain Dew, and to a lesser extent Schweppes Raspberry, HSBNE members only buy Coca-Cola and Kirks soft drinks. People prefer Fanta over Sunkist, Lift over Solo, and oh my GOD do they prefer Coke over Pepsi.
People actively hate the smaller can sizes and will avoid that line altogether, no matter what the flavour. Go 375mL, never smaller.
Coke Zero wins over Diet Coke. Don’t even bother with any other diet cola variant like Pepsi Max etc. People like having a sugarfree non-cola flavour too, but as mentioned above, don’t go crazy stockpiling many cans of it; 50 at most. Change the non-cola sugarfree option regularly, to keep things fresh.
Change is important. Swap a flavour every month or two. Between both machines we have 14 lines, and people do enjoy having a choice, but they always love something new. Especially the random line; this needs to constantly have different flavours in it, particularly flavours you can’t buy in other lines.
Keeping all the lines populated is important too. People don’t like having choices offered then taken away; think of it like giving someone a plate full of brownies but then taking one without asking & eating that brownie in front of them vs just giving someone a plate of brownies that had one less brownie in the first place. Just having the red “sold out” light there is a visual detraction. Give people 8 lines and if a single one is empty, people complain and sales drop. Add a second machine, give people 14 lines and if a single one in either machine is empty, people still complain the exact same amount and sales still drop.
When deciding the order of drinks in the machine, popular drinks should go on a higher button. You’ll also have to consider that some columns are single-sized while some columns are double-sized ones that hold more cans & are better suited for the quicker-selling flavours.
Thats a great post Mike, I will move it to the wiki once I get it up again.
I have a question, do you think we’d see better returns from increasing the per drink price? or would we see an equivalent drop in volume. I love that these things are cheap but I want to get the most of them, their function is to make money for the space and diversify our revenue.
The question becomes is the aim to maximize profit or to provide a service to members. I say this because after talking with mike a few times about the machines (he estimates we sell 20kg of sugar each month in soft drinks) its pretty clear that the primary cost is time, which he is currently giving for free. This means two things, first he is awesome, second talking about making money needs to take the maintainer of the machines wishes into account because honestly they’d be able do donate the same money each month if they spent the time working a regular part time job and donated less than 25% the revenue, even at minimum award wage.
But that aside everything bar power scales linearly with number of drinks sold. as such I’d reason that it will be an extremely high price like $2.50 and selling only a few drinks a week. On the other hand as a member who uses the machine I think that would suck… I don’t help out with moving\loading the machines and generally donate my time so people can optimize their profits, I do so in order to allow us to maintain the best service to members possible, and I feel that $1 drinks are more in line with this than $2.50 ones even if it will result in lower profit for us to spend on other cool things later.
Anyway that’s just my 2cents on the issue, I’m not the person maintaining the asset so it doesn’t really count for much, but I’m certainly hoping we can find a solution that allows us to keep or insanely cheap prices, as it stands it is a real asset to the space.
EDIT: After looking at numbers regarding the taxation of soft drinks in the UK as a way to reduce consumption, a 10% increase in price resulted in a approximately 76% of the sales, so assuming this holds true in HSBNE I may actually be wrong about my assumption that the ideal returns will be located at more than double the current price. On the other hand the study area was 1.25L bottles costing 2 pound ($3.87aud), so pricing is already far more as a luxury item than a basic food stuff as it is common in Australia or NZ.
Short answer: yes, but we should consider the purpose of these machines before raising the cost.
Long version: Originally, these machines were supposed to be nothing but a “service to members” and they weren’t supposed to be a major revenue stream. All that mattered was that they at least broke even and any profit was purely gravy. For those not around in those days, the old system was just cans in the fridge plus an honesty-system donation box which barely made even. It’s just that somehow we (mostly me but I certainly won’t take all the credit) managed to turn these machines into something that should be earning us over a thousand dollars a year.
If the machines are specifically designed to maximise profits, that’s a change in classification for them. Having the drinks priced at a nice, round numbers is a big plus. There’s also a cultural thing where, because it’s so low (“It’s only a dollar!”), I’ve observed a lot of people buy drinks for others as thanks. I wouldn’t recommend bumping it to, say, $1.20 just because managing the change is a pain for everyone and that alone will decrease sales. $1.50 is the next reasonably round number. I feel $2 would be too high (even though it’s still cheaper than any other vending machine or cafe’s prices for a cold drink). Assuming a current average of 40c/can profit, raising prices to $1.50 more than doubles the profit per can and while sales would decrease, I can’t see them halving.
Another option is to raise the prices, finish the RFID payment gateway and offer a discount for paying via RFID. There’s less hassling with coins and I’m pretty sure even a 10c/can discount would encourage a lot of members to switch to RFID. Using RFID will let us get a better idea of who is at the space on Tuesdays as most members don’t swipe in on Tuesdays, it lets someone crunch more numbers about the statistics of drinks to assist with increasing sales, and it saves time for the person who has to count the change bin, bank the money, constantly open the machine to change a note for someone or the machine eating their money, etc. This also means we can get away with using non-round numbers too. Heck, making drinks $1.20 by coin but $1 by RFID would definitely do it.
On the other hand, if the primary roles of these machines is as a service to members and not to necessarily maximise profits, we should probably keep some of their profits aside to start investing it back into improving the machines. When I’m done wiring in and coding the lights, the next step will be replacing the front polycarbonate sheets and styling the machines because I think the finished machines will be a fantastic showpiece for us. I’d also love to see the RFID payment stuff finished and for HSBNE to buy a note reader so members can load cash onto their cards at the space, which would also give a means for members to easily pay their membership or contribute to causes directly at the space - something not currently possible without an awful lot of sweet-talking the Treasurer because it’s so much extra hassle for him. Of course, we could raise prices and still do this.
TL;DR: I think it’s about time we think about what is the primary role of these machines.
While I’m spilling my brains on this topic, I’d like to offer one more word of advice to HSBNE. First off let me say that this is not a knock against any past, present or future members and not an attempt to call anyone’s character into question or anything like that. However, please be VERY careful about who you choose to manage the vending machines. This person needs to be more trustworthy with finances than our Treasurer and I sincerely mean it. They will be routinely handling hundreds of dollars of cash and product, none of it auditable or traceable, and no one would know if they were to start pocketing some on the side. Our bank accounts have records to show if a Treasurer tried to make a shady transfer, but by the very cash-based nature of the vending machines this person will have access to the machine’s cash before it’s banked and added to our accounting records. There was literally nothing stopping me pocketing hundreds of dollars of profits over the past year other than my own morals. Don’t issue a key to the machines to someone lightly, and I’d never give it to anyone whom you wouldn’t trust with server room access.
That said, there’s currently no reward for doing this job. I thought about asking to make managing the vending machines a woofing position. But I really don’t think it’s a good idea to let someone who can’t afford our monthly membership fee be in charge of handling hundreds of dollars of cash a month. I also thought about making the vending machines a cause so the people who manage them get to say where the profit is spent, but that idea has so many problems you don’t have to even tell me about them, I’m very aware of them and I wouldn’t want to even seriously suggest that idea unless I had solutions to all of them.
But finding some way to reward whoever does this job is a good idea, or else anyone doing it will just burn out.
I really like the idea of the machines taking notes to load onto your membership card, especially if in future things like the BBQ, bulk pizza order or whatever food we are doing you somehow be paid for using your card, that’s be awesome as it would allow eventually cashless functioning with immediate financial records. This means that the amount of money your trusting people to deal with will drop off dramatically as regular members start using the cards instead of cash and it will also leave a paper trail at the machine end as we know exactly how much value was loaded onto cards so its obvious if anybody is stealing from the vending machines note handling.
On another note I think that we need to ask ourselves if we want to make it a benefit of membership getting cheap drinks or make it also available to visitors, as they won’t be able to use the swipe system. I can see either way working, we could make the machines cost as much as a $1.50 cash but still be a dollar on RFID and just have it a stop on the Tuesday tour of the space for visitors to introduce the $1 drinks as a “perk” of membership. Alternately we could initially set the RFID and cash price the same and see if many people will switch just for convenience.
You also need to ask if people will start taking the dollar cash and swiping their card on behalf of another person, as I see this as the immediate result if we have a higher cost for paying cash. But then again we may or may not actually even care, after all we still don’t have to handle the extra money, still get all the accounting benefits and so on.
My thoughts on reducing burnout of the vending machine job is to split the job up. Buying the drinks and loading the storeroom can be neatly separated from loading the machines and handling the money, and only the latter is a high trust job as the former would present receipts to claim the money back and thus only has a risk of removing drinks for personal use or resale, which doesn’t seem nearly as bad since its both harder to extract value from and should show up in a storeroom inventory. This split up may seem like a pain initially, but if we where to have a EngineRoom\Wiki\Trello thread that detailed actions of each party and stocks in the areas they maintain (eg loaded 60 coke into storeroom, currently holds 30fanta 60coke 10nukacola) I don’t see it being a big deal. Of course there are other ways to divide the labor, but to me this seems the most sensible as I know of several members that are trustworthy, hardworking and willing to take on the responsibility but can’t handle the buying of drinks due to transport limitations. Also the buying the drinks could easily be handed out as a task to a different cause or person each month (see devains job bounties thread), unlike the loading of the actual machines.
I don’t think theres anything wrong with $1.50 drinks. That’s a much more useful profit margin to make it worth whoevers time goes into making it go. $1.50 is still practically 1990’s prices as far as I can remember so I feel its still a service provided at a loss compared to anywhere else.
Because the drinks stock pallet at HSBNE was still basically empty, and I had dedicated today to doing stuff for the space…
And now that the pallet is full again, other people can stock the machines without having to hassle with trying to buy them when they’re on sale. Woot!
Astute members may notice that the Cold Drinks vending machine appears to have a faint flickering light inside it. Something that’s vaguely reminiscent of a flickering fluorescent tube, but without the headache-inducing high-frequency variations nor flickers in the epilepsy-inducing range. A simulacrum of a dodgy a fluorescent tube - not quite as annoying, but similar in appearance. Something that seems to be drawing less power.
Pay no attention to the flickering light. Keep buying drinks as normal. Who knows what might happen. The lighting might improve with sales & time.
Also - see that photo above of 622 cans from the 8th of February? The Coke, Solo, Diet Lemon, Pasito, Ginger Beer, Coke Zero, Sprite and Fanta in that photo are all gone already, and we’re more than half-way through the Ginger Ale, Mountain Dew and Raspberry, and we went through some more Coke packs too. Yes I said that I expected it to last us at least 3 months, but it seems I underestimated things because we went through most of it in six weeks. I’ve acquired more and I’ve been carting it to the space over multiple trips, because this time I bought so much that after 3 carloads I still haven’t dropped it all off. Once again: we go through a lot of drinks.
Can I put forward a suggestion to switch up the diet kirks drinks? I’ve been drinking quite a bit of the diet creaming soda at home and its actually really good, doesn’t have much of that ‘diet soft drink’ taste to it
Also, thanks Mike for all the hard work 
The plan was actually already to do a diet switcharoo once we exhaust our current supply! There’s no more boxes of diet Lemon in the store room, just the few that’re left in the machine, then we’ll be making the change.
Excellent! Love me some diet creaming soda!
Our vending machine is looking a little weird these days while it goes through some “upgrades”. I’ve finished installing 80% of the LEDs in one machine. Progress is happening behind the scenes in this area and a lot of the code has been written for the LEDs but it’s not quite there yet. Expect the machines to continue changing over the following months!
In related news, dear gosh are my arms sore. You have no idea how much effort it takes to build up our stockpile this much. Diet Lemon has been replaced with Diet Creaming Soda, Pasito is back, proper Fanta/Lift/Sprite have replaced the generic Orange/Lemon/Lemonade lines, and we’re temporarily out of Mountain Dew because it’s hard to keep fifteen different lines stocked all the time. Buy another flavour for now. 
