The Future Is Ours To Shape

Believe or not, the summer of 2016 will mark the 30th anniversary of the beloved 1980s science-fiction film Back to the Future, starring Michael J. Fox. The sequel, Back to the Future 2, released in 1989, was the sixth-highest grossing film that year and made some bold predictions about what 2015 would look like. It is now 2015, and many news media outlets have been discussing how accurate those predictions actually were.

While technology still lags when it comes to self-lacing shoes, gravity-defying "hover" skateboards and clothes that shrink to fit automatically, the movie was on the mark in many aspects. Flatscreen televisions, videoconference techniques, 3D and the use of drones were some of the accurate predictions in the motion picture.

"Televisions have definitely changed a lot since the '80s, and in 2015 we'll see even more innovative versions of flatscreen TVs," wrote the New York Daily News. "We can expect more 4K televisions and the world's first see-through television. We already have biometric technology on our phones and in 2015 we can expect to see more of it. Soon people won't just be able to unlock phones and computers with their fingerprints, they'll also be able to open doors by using their heartbeats with the Nymi band. Flying cars are actually being developed, and patents have been filed for them, and a prototype for a car-plane hybrid called AeroMobile 3.0, which could potentially travel more than 430 miles in one trip, was unveiled several months ago."

My colleague, who proofreads this column, argues that secure biometric identification dates back to the early '70s, flying cars to the late-'30s Pitcairn "roadable" autogyro, drones to World War II and "3D" to the mid-19th century. But whether or not cars fly, time certainly does, and we have come a long way since the 1980s. We've discussed many of these changes in the pages of VT. While this industry has experienced its most recent profound upheaval over the past decade, our structural underpinnings remain unchanged. Vending has always been, and remains, largely an entrepreneurial business, created and led by people who follow the needs of their markets very closely and act imaginatively to meet them.

A perfect example of this imaginative progression and expansion is portrayed in this month's cover story. The article describes the process by which a bulk vending equipment manufacturer, Beaver Machine Corp., made an ambitious leap into high-tech retail automation by introducing a sophisticated multiproduct bulk-loading kiosk. The company, founded in 1963 as Machine-O-Matic, made a name for itself by designing and building attractive, durable and reliable bulk machines. The new kiosk can accommodate virtually all payment media, from bills and coins through credit and debit cards to NFC cashless systems like Apple Pay and Android Pay.

While the BMC Media-Kiosk is the impressive result of a multimillion-dollar, five-year R&D effort, I find this innovative machine especially significant because bulk vending has always been viewed as the grand-daddy of the vending industry, a business that prides itself on its traditional equipment. The majority of bulk machines on racks in locations of average volume are surprisingly similar to the Adams Gum "sales stimulators" of more than 100 years ago. Beaver will continue to manufacture that kind of iconic bulk vender, but its new kiosk concept may create a new vending category.

For a long time, the retailing industry has explored vending (or "unattended points of sale") tentatively, as a possible method for handling transactions that do not require the services of a clerk. Until recently, these explorations have not caught on because the technology for offering sufficient capacity, selectivity, pricing flexibility and customer interactivity just didn't exist. But now it does, and there is a huge opportunity for a much wider range of automated retailing innovations based on vending.

The question this raises has been raised before: what is the role for the vending operator in a retailing world whose technology increasingly converges with ours?

I think the answer is that somebody always will need to fill, clean, maintain, repair and understand what these machines can and cannot do. Innovations like coin-operated confection dispensers and record-playing machines entered the world precariously, finding niche applications when they were owned by locations with patient proprietors willing to spend a great deal of time on making them work. But when the entrepreneurs discovered vending machines, jukeboxes and coin-controlled games, everything changed. They saw a new market when everyone else saw a conversation piece. This happens all the time, and I don't think it will stop.