Spring Has Sprung

I write this column in the wake of a successful collocated Amusement Expo and NBVA show, and will be on my way to Las Vegas for the National Automatic Merchandising Association OneShow as this issue hits your mailbox. Many of you probably will be reading this just before, or while attending, the show -- and I do hope you will stop by the Vending Times booth and say hello!

As you'll read in this issue, attendance and exhibitor space reservations were way up at the Amusement Expo, which is owned by the Amusement and Music Operators Association and the American Amusement Machine Association. The music and games segment experienced a rally the likes of which it had not seen in more than a decade. There were also 44 first-time exhibiting companies this year, compared with 31 in 2014, which is a very good sign of new interest in the market.

Amusement Expo has been cosponsored by the National Bulk Vendors Association for the past five years, which allows NBVA to benefit from a collocated trade show. While exhibitor participation in the NBVA's 2015 pavilion at the expo declined from 43 booths in 2014 to 40 this year, attendance by bulk vending professionals was way up; at the close of registration on the first day of this year's show, 300 had registered, compared with 224 for both days last year.

I recall a column I wrote a few years ago in which I said that the music and amusements business as we knew it was on the trailing edge of a wave that crested in the 1960s, and had become almost exhausted. Unless it transformed itself into something else -- probably something unrecognizable to those who pioneered it more than four decades ago -- it did not have a bright future.

Well, that transformation appears to be happening; and while it surely is unrecognizable, there are reassuring signs of continuity, too. The manufacturers that are doing well are offering consumers experiences that cannot be duplicated at home or with a handheld device. And while jukeboxes offer experiences more or less similar to those you can get with an iPhone, those gadgets don't provide the social element, the "audience effect" nor the acoustic richness. Today's coin-op games offer similar experiences that can't be had with handheld devices or desktop computers. To be successful, today's operator (and manufacturer, supplier and distributor) must not only deliver good products and services, but must also provide an "experience" that consumers will see as valuable.

Customers are attracted by state-of-the-art machines that are sophisticated and come surrounded with a social magnetic field or aura, and this is true of vending, too. Unlike jukeboxes and immersive games, the appeal of vending has not been that it provided things that you couldn't get at home, but rather, refreshments that you could have at home but did not expect to find at work or on the road. And vending permits you to enjoy them at any hour of the day or night.

The challenge has always been that machines can be perceived as impersonal and, perhaps, frustrating because of limited payment options and other annoyances that offset their strategic convenience. This appears to be improving, too. Not only are today's machines far more reliable than ever before, but more and more of them enable consumers to make purchases with their smartphones, virtually view detailed product ingredient statements and participate in online experience sharing.

In short, after lunging exhausted into the new millennium, these industries -- and many others -- encountered challenges at least equivalent to the "deindustrialization" and related social and ecomic upheavals that had so alarmed everyone in the 1970s. That was a profoundly transformative era -- and we are just emerging from another one. Many operations merged or simply vanished; the ones that survived now have the opportunity to grow, and they are looking for ideas to help them do it. Moreover, that painful pruning has cleared the way for a new generation of imaginative entrepreneurs to look at vending, music and amusement equipment in a new way and find creative new uses for it. And bulk vending remains a fine way for service-oriented people with good social skills to learn the business.

It is important to keep in mind that everyone running amusement and vending equipment is (and always has been) in a relationship with both their locations and their patrons. What makes me optimistic about music and amusement operators is that they always have known that they are in the entertainment business. This became even more evident to me at the F2FEC Conference last month (see VT, March 2015). The vending industry would also do well to start thinking of itself in similar light, and expand its business mindset from equipment service and product sales to doing those things in the context of an enjoyable experience that consumers will wish to repeat.