The Fourth of July weekend was not as good this year as last year. I think that I might have some competition at one of my apartment complexes. Sales are down quite a bit at one particular complex. Often there is someone that will decide to sale soda and candy and things from their apartment. I will just have to keep providing good service and hope that they get tired of people knocking on their door all of the time.
Someone asked about vandalism and theft problems. The fourth machine that we placed was broken into within a week of placing it. Someone was able to break into the dollar bill exchanger by prying it open. See the picture of the damage. They only got about $15 but cost me more than $100 in replacement cost. I will try to take some pictures of our newly designed cages that offer more protection to the dollar bill exchanger. We have since put a metal plate over the dollar bill exchanger with a cut out for people to stick the dollar bills in. There is not enough room for someone to get their hands in it to get out the money. Since we did that we have not had any problems with that location. That was about 10 months ago.
Thieves are looking for an easy target. They don't want to get caught. Why bother something that is going to take 15-30 minutes to get into when they can go down the street and find something that will take less than 5 minutes to get into. So the goal in theft protection is to make your machine a lot of work to break into so they will move on to another machine down the road. I know that the cages that we have built can be broken into if someone is determined, but I am banking on them not wanting to put that much effort into their endeavor.
I only have cages on the machines that are located at apartment complexes. I have machines at businesses that I have not needed to place cages around because they are in more secure locations and only available during business hours.
Vandalism is a little harder to deal with. I consider vandalism to be anything that disrupts the functioning of the machine without loss of money or product that was placed in the machine or that defaces the machine in some way. The forms of vandalism that I have encountered are people putting things like leaves, pennies, sticks and so forth in the coin slot or sometimes dollar bill slot. The only way I have found to fight that is by responding whenever someone calls and says there is a problem. For about two weeks, I had someone putting things in one of my machines everyday. I just kept going to the machine every day and fixing it. They eventually gave up. I always put a sign saying that "Coin jam is fixed." or something like that. Then I put the date that I fixed it on the sign. I have actually laminated the sign and then I use a sharpie to write on it. Then I can take it down and erase the writing with alcohol. This seems to help a lot. People then know that I respond to any problems and they are more likely to call me in the future.
I have also had people smear the machine with mud, throw fingernail polish on it, or smear the buttons with paint (I actually think that was just someone not paying attention to how dirty his hands were when he pressed the button). I just clean it up. I keep cleaning solution in my bucket that I take with me when I service the machines. So far, I have not had anything that I couldn't remove with a mild cleaning spray and some elbow grease. I think that the cages also help with the defacement vandalism because people cannot reach the machine very easy to deface it. The cage doesn't provide a solid work surface for their "artwork".
We have been blessed with very little vandalism and theft problems. I try not to let any of the problems that I do have get me too upset. I have found that if I just calmly try to figure out how to fix it, life goes a lot easier. I knew that there would be problems with the soda machines. I think that if I didn't realize that there would be problems, I would be much more upset when things go wrong.
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