This project is a wrapper for a cluster of sub-projects around creative reuse of classic snack and fresh food vending machines to explore alternative retail formats.

The Meta-Problem

Retail is broken.  Malls are as cheery as pediatric oncology wards.   Main Street retail is dead.  Specialty retail is dying.  Maybe the future really is one where retail is either deep discount (Walmart, Target, et al), Mass Luxury (LVMH, Kering, Richemont et al) or SHEIN/Temu/Alibaba.   Hopefully not.   On-premises retail scratches deep itches in the primate brain - those of discovery of new and novel things and of instant gratification.  

The Strengths Of Automated Retail

I - Convenience

Automated retail excels at convenience - if customers can get in front of the machine, they can have gratification like a bowl of oatmeal - hot and instant.

II- Efficiency

Vending equipment can pack a lot of product into a small amount of floor space, with limited needs for utilities.

III - Novelty

Because 95% of vending in the US is soft drinks and snack foods, there's an element of novelty in automated retail that has been exploited to a limited degree but substantial success by clever marketers.  

The Gaps In Automated Retail

I - Information

Vending is usually a low-information environment for customers - traditional machines in North America are designed to efficiently display a limited selection of widely-understood consumer packaged goods for a rapid purchase by a convenience-driven shopper.     It's not entirely unlike deep-discount retail - while there's a wide selection of goods in a Walmart, there isn't much supporting information about them - there are no well-informed salespeople, there's no handy reference to turn to for more details. 

On the other side of the pre-purchase information continuum, specialty retail often has well-informed salespeople, but the labor and real estate costs are burdensome and this produces margin pressure.    Is the connection to in-depth information worth the price of admission?  Some categories support this well, others don't.    

II- Connection

On-premises specialty retail is sometimes very effective at creating bonds between consumers and brands that have value in a world that is increasingly commodified/enshittified.  Can automated retail be tweaked to foster similar types of bonds without all of the expense?

III - Discovery and Exploration

On-premises retail can do things that virtual and automated retail and struggle with around discovery and exploration of new products.  You can touch and experience before you make a financial committment.  Traditonal vending and automated retail are designed to be poor at this.  You pays your money, you takes your chances.  The stakes aren't very high when it's a bag of chips or a new flavor of soda, but in many categories, a product behind glass is a product that creates doubt and friction in the purchase process.  Can we explore ways to improve discovery and exploration in automated retail?

IV - Vending  Operational  Model

Much of automated retail and thus vending hardware has been optimized for route operations where a single operator purchases products wholesale and visits machines on a schedule to restock them from a central warehouse.  Are there models that could support a diversity of product retailers inside a single vending installation?

Closing The Gaps 

I - More Information

What if the machines were upgraded to deliver deeper information about the products inside?  What could we do with touchscreens, QR codes, a rich data store and connection to customers' handheld devices?  Could we tell deeper stories about the products inside?  Could we surface better resources curated by experts on the products? 

II- Connection

Can we use loyalty programs, producer bios, reviews, gamification and curation to turn a transactional delivery system into one that rewards continued interaction?  Can automated retail be a new piece of a multichannel strategy for marketers that are currently using other channels as a means of both creating new connections and strengthening existing ones by improving the vending technology?

III - Discovery and Exploration

Can we explore ways to allow touch and feel for certain products before committing to the transaction?  Can machine vision and sensor fusion allow us to protect product and shift the model?

IV - Vending  Operational  Model

What would a multi-tenant vending solution look like from an operational and technological perspective.  Can we create a "farmer's market" model where the vending machine owner is hosting a multiude of rotating merchants, who make their own decisions around pricing, product mix and replenishment?

A Low-Stakes Starting Point

Thanks to the unravelling of a local Ponzi scheme wrapped in cloak of a vending business, we have a chance to explore these ideas on a small fleet of machines at a very low price.  The bankruptcy trustee inadvertently glutted the nationwide market for used vending equipment by auctioning the equipment inventory of dozens of affiliated companies simultaneously, depressing values 75-90% from typical used-equipment prices.  Oopsie.  We seized the moment and acquired a fleet of Crane National 431 "Shopper" machines (typically used to vend chilled fresh packaged food such as sandwiches and salads) and SEAGA Infinity Series snack machines (typically used to vend chips and candy bars). 

Initial Technology Upgrades

Our first focus is on creating a highly reliable solution suitable for vending reasonably valuable products in semi-controlled environments such as complementary conventional retailers, campus environments and community spaces such as libraries.  We'll do this with a combination of commercial off-the-shelf hardware, in-house engineered solutions and further creative reuse.   This will give us units that can be experienced instead of just talked about.

We're inclined to do this with Raspberry Pi-based compute platforms, updated microcontroller and bus architectures for actual machine operations, a modern lighting and environmental control platform and an emphasis on modular IP-connected solutions.  We'll break out more on these in subsequent Project posts.

Conclusion

This project is allowing us a low-stakes way to explore how creative reuse of proven vending technology can marry with modern interactive technology to provide new opportunities to connect marketers and consumers in ways that are novel to the North American market.