Have you converted your single column Laurel vendor to Electronic?

[scout]

We have had our vendors for a long time---works great 90% of time.
We are looking at upgrade to Electronic conversion, but get a cold sweat on the $300 to $570 price! per unit---
Is it worth it? what other choices would we have? Any ideas?​

 

[MEP001]

For what it costs to upgrade a bunch of mechanical vendors, you can get a spiral vendor.

 

[PaulLovesJamie]

I upgraded mine when the electronic conversion kits first came out (10 years ago??), but at that time I only had 3 single column vendor plus one 5 col little trees vendor. (I have since added 5 more electronic drop shelfs and a shur-vend.) My primary reason for the upgrade was so that I could accept tokens in the vendors - critical for me because I stopped selling quarters out of my change machine.
Was it worth it?
For the 5 col tree vendor, absolutely, I sell a ton of them.
For the first 3 single col vendors which are my 3 highest selling vends, I think it was worth it.
For the remaining 5 drop shelfs... I dont know.

The mechanicals just seem outdated to me, I think it presents the wrong image of your wash.

Regarding MEPs comment about getting a spiral vendor - true, cant argue with that. IF you have a good place to put one. I have both, and no I will not be selling my drop shelf vendors because I still sell about 30% of my vending through them. (Thats an off the top of my head estimate.)

 

[mjwalsh]

Scout,

I am with Paul on this because we also have both. Laurel manufacturer is great to work with. I will say that we do have unexplained bizarre motor improper activation on our glass front 50+ product spiral vendor ... that we do not have with our 3 column electronic Laurel vendor or with our 4 item Laurel dispensing within our PLC controlled dog wash. Hopefully, we will eventually resolve that AMS issue ... so the intent is not to bad mouth AMS. The ability to have access to & use gold colored dollar coins & not just quarters to use in whatever vendor is definitely a plus contrary to what some jackals imply.

mike

 

[scout]

It looks like i could get better results by buying a 3 column vender at $1000 than 3 conversions at $1500. This would get me all new units too. This is advice recently given to me---thanks.

 

[trentu]

I never converted any of my mechnical but I started to replace them with electronic just so I could get a multi-coin acceptance (I use tokens) and so I could price things differently ($1 on some $1.50 on others in same 3 column).