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Vending Tokens and Trees

I have to say your token vendor idea is excellent in one respect: it'll cost you practically nothing to implement, and if it doesn't work, you get to slap on a different decal and load a different product.
 
Thanks. My sign guy is coming today to 'spec out' a decal for this purpose and I told a quarters customer about the plan for vending single tokens.

This is a short-term fix. I have changed my mind now and plan to buy 4 multitrons asap.
 
We're planning on ordering either a large glass-front vendor or a 5-column Little Trees one
My 5 column (electronic) little tree vendor is one of my most popular destinations. I sell them for $1 (tokens and quarters:)), I go through about 700 - 800 per month. Its been that way since I installed it 10 years ago.

2 years ago I put in a shur-vend, we have an entire row for "fragrances", all are different than the little trees (sprays, clips, yankee candle, etc). Interesting: Even though we now sell other fragrance options in the shur-vend, our sales of little trees has NOT declined!

It's a tough call - glass front vendor OR 5-col little trees. My point is that IF you have a good spot to put a 5 col vendor, it would not be a wasted purchase if you later decided to install the glass-front. Well, at least thats how it worked out for me.
 
Plus, as an added bonus of the 5-column Laurel Little trees vendor, it comes fully stocked with product. That means that you break even pretty much when you sell out of the free 'fillup'.
 
Three pages of discussion on this...did you receive any good advice? If you're going to vend tokens in an envelope, I wonder if a hardware store wouldn't just give you a bunch of those little envelopes they use for screws, nuts, washers, etc.. I'm sure you give them enough business!

As for the Little Trees....seems like New Car, Vanilla, and Wild Cherry sell really well.
 
Yes, I got super advice! Randy Nix even called. He got me to open up my coinboxes and I found I had Slugbuster II's, which will accept both quarters and tokens!!! :o I had previously asked my distributor about this and he said I needed new coin acceptors, so I left it at that for the time being. I thought they would accept quarters also, because they have a quarter and token as 'set coins' inside. Then I thought maybe they had been specially modified somehow to accept only tokens and he must be right, but I may be accepting quarters in the SS bays very soon.

Great advice has once again done me right. thanks!
 
PaulLovesJamie said:
It's a tough call - glass front vendor OR 5-col little trees. My point is that IF you have a good spot to put a 5 col vendor, it would not be a wasted purchase if you later decided to install the glass-front. Well, at least thats how it worked out for me.
Actually the plan was one or the other, but there's plenty of room for both.

I had planned on adding a 3-column and a 5-column, but that's only 8 additional items for half the cost of a big Shur-Vend. It makes more sense to me to add 30 or so new vending items instead.
 
Waxman said:
I had previously asked my distributor about this and he said I needed new coin acceptors, so I left it at that for the time being.

Assuming you do in fact have the dual-coin Slugbuster II's (There is a SB II model that takes only one coin), and assuming you have the timers and acceptors set where the token sends four pulses, it should be a simple matter of turning the quarter sensitivity up, and you're taking quarters.

If you do decide to change some acceptors, I recommend IDX MA-800 over the Multitron. The latter has been dodgy in my experience and just doesn't hold up, where we've had two dozen MA-800's in service for six years without a single hiccup.

Slugbuster II's have one major flaw: they will accept the dollar coin, but only give credit for a quarter. The only way to stop it is to use something to narrow the slot so dollar coins won't fit. The only Slugbuster that can properly distinguish the dollar coin from a quarter is the III.
 
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