Vending Blog #13?An Updated Glass-Front History & ShurVend Vendors

[Uncle Sam]

Mac and I.B. (in the current Vend-It post) brought up some basic questions about vending in the car wash business that I am addressing from a historical context and perspective.

Let’s face some facts! Car wash products are very difficult to vend reliably, vandalism is a constant threat necessitating good security, and the revenues generated out of the old, standard drop shelf vendors have never been a significant percentage of total wash revenue. This lack of vending revenue did not create a “market opportunity” that interested car wash equipment manufacturers (for the most part) in investing in the R&D to build better vending equipment. They are not ignorant of the numbers, Mac, so I don’t think it reflects on our industry as a whole. What it says is that a company’s limited number of dollars should be spent building other kinds of equipment.

Industrial Vacuum Systems and Monorail (who built the “Vending Vault” by working with an operator who later got a patent it) are the only companies that I know who tried to design, build, and sell a “glass-front” type vendor starting from zero for the car wash industry. Now both are out of business or part of another organization. In my opinion these two companies tried to “reinvent the wheel” by starting from zero when there was a long established vending industry already established that was technologically better, could spread R&D costs over many units, and whose price point for all this knowledge was very good. The only thing not addressed by the vending industry has been the security issue. They didn’t address it because lunch rooms and offices do not need it. The company I use, AMS, does not really address the security issue either, although they made an attempt at it with their “Outsider”. A computer controls the glass-front vendor, so AMS does continue to innovate and redesigns the software 3 or 4 times a year to update constantly as technology changes for the better.
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[Uncle Sam]

The ShurVend Story.

In 1996 I got sick and tired of the old mechanical drop shelf’s problems, vandalism, and the paucity of revenue in comparison to the amount of time I spent on them. I had seen many attempts of other operators trying to use regular snack vendors to vend car wash products at their sites. Vending car wash products was not easy or very reliable and vandalism was a constant problem, so most operators just gave it up. I.B. is the one of the few I know who kept tinkering (long before me) with the ordinary snack vendors until he got them working well enough to be successful.

I didn’t want to “reinvent the wheel” so I bought some “off the shelf” snack vendors and began to tinker, cut, and splice, trying to get them to work reliably. I even built an expanded metal “cage” to protect them. This experience was pretty frustrating for a number of years. Progress was made because I’m stubborn and monthly sales volume with the new “glass-front” vendor increased about 500 %, so all the aggravation was worth the effort. The bill validators and coin changers got salted, watered, screw-driver pry bar type damage, and smashed by a hammer once in a while, but each time I designed something new to reduce the threat. My first vendors were from the same company that jumped into car wash vending business with the Fawn brand and it wasn’t a very happy experience for car wash operators or them. This Forum was just getting started, the bad news traveled fast, and Fawn got “blistered” in posts constantly with problems operators were having. Fawn and Crane National vendors are still trying to get some of the business, but security is still a big problem for them.
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[Uncle Sam]

I finally found a new start-up vending company called AMS, Inc in 1998 that had a patented, new ?Guaranteed Delivery Feature? in their snack vendor that I thought would solve many of the reliability problems in vending car wash products. This feature worked like a charm, so I could turn my attention to the security problems for the vendor. I built a security enclosure that completely enclosed the vending machine and left just enough openings for customers to use the machine. Sales volume increased for my own operation, so I thought I would offer my vending system to the whole car wash industry. I decided to show my vendor and security system at the 1999 Western Car Wash show in Las Vegas. I had been to some car wash shows as an operator, but never participated as an exhibitor. Talk about jumping into something new ?cold turkey?!! This is where ShurVend came into being, since I needed a brand name. Now, as they say, the rest is history.

We continue to add new technology as it becomes available, new customized vendor models since every wash is different, continue to produce a quality product that will last for years in the car wash environment, and provide after sale service to all of our customers.

Uncle Sam