Uncle Sam
Member
Recently a long time customer?s unsecured vendor got clobbered after experiencing very little vandalism/theft for a number of years. We have always been cautious in selling any of our vendors to operators for installation at an unattended site open 24/7/365 without recommending very strongly a complete security package. But some customers insist they don?t need the security because ?their customers are not like that?. We believe the customer can assess his/her exposure to vandalism better than we can. So we give them what they want. Some operators got away with this thinking for a number of years, but now it is coming back to bite them.
Communities can change very quickly demographically and I?m certain the present economic situation has increased everybody?s risk to theft and vandalism exponentially. It is not the local people that cause this situation, but others from out of town that are just cruisin? looking for easy pickin?s. We have no way to cure this kind of problem other than to recommend total security for their installation. After a loss it gets expensive; loss of money and product in the vendor, loss of sales during the down time, plus the extra costs of a new security structure, repairing the damage, and replacing lost parts such as changers and/or bill validator. And there is the operator aggravation, mental anguish, and extra work that is hard to put a $$$ value on!
The customers that bought the complete security package for the vendor up front have had very few if any vandalism or theft problems over the years and just take money to the bank and keep refilling the machine. That doesn?t mean that some clown wouldn?t try to ?test the security to see if they could breech it? at wash sites; it just means that there was no loss of money or product and the damage was minimal or easily fixed.
Cont'd
Communities can change very quickly demographically and I?m certain the present economic situation has increased everybody?s risk to theft and vandalism exponentially. It is not the local people that cause this situation, but others from out of town that are just cruisin? looking for easy pickin?s. We have no way to cure this kind of problem other than to recommend total security for their installation. After a loss it gets expensive; loss of money and product in the vendor, loss of sales during the down time, plus the extra costs of a new security structure, repairing the damage, and replacing lost parts such as changers and/or bill validator. And there is the operator aggravation, mental anguish, and extra work that is hard to put a $$$ value on!
The customers that bought the complete security package for the vendor up front have had very few if any vandalism or theft problems over the years and just take money to the bank and keep refilling the machine. That doesn?t mean that some clown wouldn?t try to ?test the security to see if they could breech it? at wash sites; it just means that there was no loss of money or product and the damage was minimal or easily fixed.
Cont'd
