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.
622 cans. My largest ever single haul. ~250kg of drinks is as tiring to carry as you think it is. We now have around a month of water, two months of coke & >3 months of everything else, plus two additional flavours to substitute in. All expiry dates are as far away as you can reasonably get (eg most are January 2016). Both machines have had all lines fully loaded up, too. For what it’s worth I kept track of how long this all took, and today I spent 1 hour, 55 minutes doing stuff solely related to the drinks machines - and that was with help from a bunch of other people. That’s about average for a day where everything needs doing.
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
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.
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.
Looks awesome mike… It’d be really cool if it looked like a normal machine but did that for a fixed duration (thing like 1-5 minutes) after a drink is bought, adding to the remaining time for each subsequent purchase. I know its a dumb thing to say given that I’m not going to be doing the coding for it, but from what I’ve seen with sub\donation incentives on services like TwitchTV it actually may provide more positive reinforcement for using the service than you’d initially think.
Not going to give away any spoilers (mostly because I haven’t finished coding it yet so I don’t know what I’ll end up doing), but let’s just say that once the final LED strip is in place I plan to tap into the buttons so I can sense when coins have been inserted & buttons have been pressed.
Sure thing! Our current stock levels are pretty high though, we’ve got >2 months of stock in around 80% of our flavours.
Cold Drinks machine:
Coke
Ginger Beer
Lift
Fanta
Random
Pasito
Coke Zero
Water
Coca-Cola/Port-Cola machine:
Water
Raspberry
Mountain Dew
Sprite
Ginger Ale
Diet Creaming Soda
Another point of note: we don’t buy many Pepsi/Schweppes flavours any more, because they don’t sell. I’m not having personal bias here, I see them regularly on sale at lower prices than Coke products and would love to have the higher profit margin, but they just don’t get bought by members. As in, the last time I tried stocking their products, we ended up having some of the cans go off because they went unsold for so long they expired. The only exceptions are Green Solo, Raspberry and Mountain Dew.
I’ve updated the links in this post so the URLs point to the latest iterations of the Coles/Woolworths/IGA online listings.
If you haven’t already noticed them on the machines, we now have some new button labels! This has really improved the machines’ appearances now that we don’t have dodgy Dymo labels stuck to the outside of the buttons. All labels are fully laminated for longevity and to help with inserting them into the large Cold Drinks machine’s tricky buttons. Also, I individually cleaned and polished the buttons’ clear plastic so they’re not all scratched & faded yellow and so you can actually see through them to read the new labels.
Thanks to Chang-Yi for doing up these video-game-inspired designs! If you can’t see them clearly (and if we ever have to print them again in the future), here’s the source files:
I’m a little late getting this up; I’ve been crazy busy. Still, better late than never - here’s the statistics for the Drinks Machines over the last year. The short version is that they earned us a net profit of $2124 during the last executive’s run, during which we sold just over 4000 drinks at an average rate of around 75 a week. Yes that’s over 1.5 tonnes of drinks.
Where to go from here: In the upcoming year, I’d like to finish the lighting upgrade by making the buttons interactive and a feedback source for the animations. I’d also like to finish the fitout of the other machine with animated lighting. Beyond that, the plan is to also actually start the exterior makeover of these two machines - at least one of them will be a Slurm machine but there doesn’t seem to be a clear consensus for the other one yet. I’d also like to lower their electricity consumption even further with some small insulation upgrades/repairs. And who knows, maybe the RFID swipe payment system will be activated some time this year too - at which point the prices will slightly rise if you continue to pay by coin, because it’ll be so much easier for us to manage RFID payments. If we have time, there may be automated statistics generation & reporting happening, too!
No, that doesn’t include the electrical costs of the machines. I need to re-measure these machines since there have been some changes that would impact their electrical consumption, however I can conservatively say that these machines cost well under $200 per year (combined) in electricity.
