Drinks Machines

riumplus · 1 February 2015 13:25

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

Keys to these machines are currently with the exec and there’s a copy in the server room attached to a big metal “don’t lose me” sign. Please don’t lose them. It’s nearly $40 to get another set cut.
When loading the machines, place the top of the can or the lid of the bottle pointing towards the back of the machine. This decreases the chance of a can bursting while vending.
Don’t overfill the lines; the motors can only take so much weight on them. Basically stay a can or three below the top of the metal sheet edge, and keep the double line of bottled water half-full.
When a line’s empty light turns on, there’s still 2-4 cans left in the machine. Try to avoid manually removing those cans as priming the machine is a pain that normally leads to the machine crunching cans if you don’t do it juuust right. When swapping flavours, it’s MUCH easier to just add them on top of the old stock then vend out few remaining the old cans.
Whenever the cold drinks machine is opened you will need to empty the moisture tray. Grab a bucket & cup to quickly empty the first half, then use a kitchen sponge to soak up the rest. You really have to do this every time; you’ll be amazed how quickly it fills up.
Don’t tighten the lock on the cold drinks machine too tight. If you’re straining to do or undo it, that’s too much. So long as it’s caught the latch, spinning the lock tighter doesn’t make the machine any more secure; it just pulls the door closer. It only needs to be closed enough to form a good air seal on the rubber strip around the door. Overdoing it will over-compress the seal and damage it.
Our electricity is billed based on the time of use, Tariff 22. Off-peak time is 9pm-7am weekdays, plus all weekends. Restocking drinks adds a lot of thermal mass to the machines that needs to be chilled, plus it means you’re leaving the door open for a long time while you do it. This might sound like splitting hairs but loading up the machines after 9pm or on a weekend will save us a dollar or so every time. If it needs loading at 6pm on a Tuesday then just load it right away, but it’s a pretty easy cost-cutting measure to keep in the back of your mind. FYI, I calculated the machine’s total energy cost to be around 5c/can worst-case, but we sell a lot of cans so this small amount adds up.
Bottles are currently limited to two lines; one per machine. This isn’t easy to change and on one machine it requires permanent modifications. Don’t change these unless you have a very good reason.
Speaking of bottles, the machines need calibrating for the size of items it’s vending. The can lines are all sized for 375mL cans and the bottle lines are currently sized for Woolworths Select home-brand water bottles. Stick to these sizes or you have to recalibrate the lines, adding/removing spacers, and that’s a tedious job.
If something breaks beyond repair, there’s a spare single-column motor, double-column motor & some microswitches in a labelled & taped-shut box in the server room. Don’t use these for anything other than the drinks machines since we had to import them from the US and they’re NOT cheap!
Coke-product cardboard boxes are fairly robust when unopened but weak when opened. However Kirks boxes are weak even when unopened and the handles routinely rip off. Don’t carry Kirks boxes by the handle. You will have the handle rip off & drop the box, making a big mess and negating the profit from a dozen cans all at once.
When emptying the coin box, check the supply of spare change. You may need to feed some coins back into the machine (but don’t fill them past the marked lines); there’s a slot to do this just above) the change store tubes.
When storing boxes in the store room, if you’re stacking boxes never stack them more than 6 cans on top of one another (meaning a max of 3 boxes high for 24-pack cubes of Coke) but keep it to 4 cans on top of one another wherever possible. Store them with the cans standing upright for maximum structural strength. This means that because Kirks & Mountain Dew cans are on their side in the boxes, you need to stack these boxes on their side. Failure to do this may result in a can rupturing, the pile collapsing and an awful sticky, stinky mess in the store room.
Try to stack drinks on the pallet with the oldest stock at the front and the newest stock at the back, so we constantly use up the oldest stuff. We don’t want cans to expire. Yes this can happen, and has happened.
Never put any drinks on the ground in the store room, only on the pallet. This room becomes a shallow pool when it rains and I’ve personally waded through 4cm deep water in there. Damp, rotting cardboard smells horrible.

Buying drinks

A dollar a can is an insanely low price and the only way these machines make a profit is because we buy the cans in bulk when they’re on sale. I contacted Coca-Cola Amatil about establishing an account with them and they wanted to charge us more than we can get at a supermarket ourselves during sales. Plus waiting around HSBNE all day for a delivery truck isn’t an option since most people work or have uni.
Drinks do have an expiry date. Always check it on every box you pick up before placing in your trolley. Generally this isn’t much of an issue as regular sugar drinks take around a year to go off and it’s easy to get boxes that expire in 9 months or more. Having said that, we have had flavours go off in the past because the dates weren’t checked. It also means you shouldn’t go crazy with stockpiling cans in case people stop drinking that flavour. Diet soft drinks in particular only have an expiry date 6 months from manufacture when new, which means you have to try hard to get the newest boxes only 4+ months from expiring and we can’t ever stockpile much diet stuff.
How much stock do we need? Well, the whole reason we have a stockpile is to avoid running out of any flavour. That and it’s much easier to take one trip to the store rather than six trips. Plus, you can get a better deal if you buy in bulk when it’s cheapest & use them over the following months, increasing profit margins. I used to try to keep a stockpile of around 50 cans for the less popular flavours, 100 for the more popular flavours, and as much Coke as I could buy when it was last at a good price because we go through 30+ cans of Coke a week. This gives you a month or two of leeway to slowly pick up flavours when they go on sale. It’s all very varied though, particularly when you’re constantly rotating which flavours are in the machines. So much hassle to keep all the numbers in your mind, but someone does need to be paying attention to it.
When to buy drinks depends on the current sale and our stockpile level - you don’t want to run out but you don’t want to buy a few hundred at just an average sale price, only to have a huge sale happen the following week. But some general guidelines: If it’s under 50c/can load our stockpile up to completely full (and if it happens to be Coke buy as many as you can, visiting multiple stores if necessary. I’m serious here. Get 600+ cans of just Coke). 50-60c a can, load us up if we’re empty or running low. 60-70c/can, only buy if we’re gonna run out. 70c+, only buy if it’s Coke and we’re gonna run out. 80c/can or higher, I would never buy because it’s not worth the time for so little profit.
Kirks drinks are frequently on sale for 50c/can so try to hold out for the 40c/can sales if possible, but stores also don’t normally have many boxes on the shelves. Which is a problem when two 30-can cubes is the same number of cans as six boxes of Kirks. I’ve cleared out a supermarket’s shelves many times.
The main sources of cheap drinks are Coles, Woolworths and IGA. Physically visiting stores to check prices is for crazy people; we have the internets these days! You’ll want to bookmark these links to Coles Online and Woolworths Online soft drink listings. Add in your postcode so it shows your local store’s prices, sort by unit price, show maximum number of items per page, then use that to see where & what the sales currently are. For IGA, there is no online store but you can find your nearest IGA location and view their most recent catalogue online. Catalogues always list any soft drink sales. Don’t forget that cost per can is what matters most, not the box price, and don’t be shy to pull out your phone to calculate them out. $17 for a 30-pack is cheaper than $14 for a 24-pack.
Woolworths has a free to sign up for rewards card, and you can only get some sales if you have one. I recommend getting one. If you’re a Flybuys user at Coles, totally swipe your card - those points are your reward for doing the job
If you can establish a good relationship with your local IGA manager they may bulk order drinks just for you at a discounted price. I never got around to doing this but I’ve heard of lots of people doing this because it’s apparently cheaper than a CCA account. I totally recommend investigating this at one point, to see what prices they’d give us - probably higher than supermarket sales but it’d be much easier to manage.
If anyone at the supermarket asks, I found the best cover story is that you got stuck buying all the drinks for a family reunion barbecue, but * “you should see the poor guy who has to buy the meat!” *
One more thing… Vehicles do have a maximum carrying capacity weight limit. You will hit this limit before you run out of space in your car. Check what it is on your car and don’t exceed this, keeping in mind around 400g/can. It varies per vehicle (plus your own bodyweight) but for my cars it’s around 600 cans plus me as the driver. Yes I’ve gone right up to the limit many times before, more often than I posted in photos above. We go through thousands of drinks a year.

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.