How To Choose A Refurbished Vending Machine

A REFURBISHED VENDING MACHINE CONVERSATION

If you are interested in finding the best refurbished vending machine, you’ll want to ask yourself these questions; watch the video. Let’s assume you want a reliable machine that’s easy to maintain with little trouble and customers will be happy with it.

Does the refurbished vending machine look brand new?

  • How was the machine painted?
  • Was it sanded and smoothed down before the paint was applied?
  • What do the trim strips look like?
  • Is the glass scratch free and clean?
  • Do the lights work? Are they LED or regular lights?
  • What do the spirals and trays look like?

Does the refurbished vending machine work perfectly?

  • Has the machine been taken apart and inspected?
  • Has the machine been tested with money?
  • Has the pricing been setup?
  • Has the pricing been checked for proper operation?
  • Can the machine be customized with specific visual fronts and graphics?
  • Can a cashless payment system be included?

What kind of recourse do you have if there’s a problem with the machine when you receive it?

  • Are you dealing with someone who has been in business for a long time?
  • Is the company solution oriented with additional upgrades?
  • Does the company you are buying from have a good reputation?

Here’s a look at A&M Equipment Sales refurbishment process from receiving the worn machine to the completely refurbished vending machine with all the steps in between. See A&M Equipment Sales current refurbished vending machines.

Calorie Info AMS Vending Machines

Calorie Info AMS Vending Machines The government requires all vending machines to comply with the new health codes which means calorie info must be displayed on the machine for each product before the sale. How are operators going to handle this requirement?

This is part of the healthcare reform act and the reason you need to vote.

AMS has a program to comply with this law, but their new firmware does more than just comply with this regulation. If you have older equipment you’ll need some way to do this. AMS has a retrofit for the Sensit 3 board which can be added to the machine, but if you have a Sensit 3 board, you simply need the new firmware in this way you will have Calorie info AMS Vending Machines.

Advantages:
1. Use your computer to input all the data into the firmware on an SD card and then load it on to each machine. This saves a lot of time.
2. You can load multiple planagrams into your machines – a fantastic resource with flexibility.

The initial cost is less than $50.

Going forward all A&M Equipment Sales refurbished AMS machines will have the Sensit 3 board installed. and will have Calorie Info AMS Vending Machines

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

Tom: All right, I’m Tom with the Vending Business Show here again with Larry Towner, who is a vending business consultant with which-

Larry Towner: Service Group International.

Tom: I am having a great show today, everybody.Calorie Info AMS Vending Machines So, thanks for being here Larry. We’re, we’re talking about the new calorie requirements for vending machines that have been coming, that are coming out. The government has basically said all vending machines have to comply with the health codes now and they are required to produce calorie counts for all products in the vending machine if, for vendors, vending operators have more than 20 or more machines. So how are operators going to handle this, do you think, Larry?

Larry Towner  :Calorie Info AMS Vending Machines   Well, let’s settle a couple of questions. First off, if you don’t have more than 20 vending machines, you’re really not in the vending business. You’re just kind of a hobbyist at best. So it’s really going to affect almost all the people that are in the vending business, in some form or another. I’m just gonna throw out this political statement. Folks, this is part of the healthcare reform act. This is the reason why you need to vote. If you, Tom and I were talking about it before the show, if you think that people are going to look at that display screen and say, “Wow, I was going to buy those Cheetos, but they’ve got 140 calories in it and I’ve decided I’m not going to buy them.” but you need to be well informed, so I guess there might be some things to do with it.

Larry Towner: What we’re going to talk about is we’re going to talk a little bit about one of the manufacturers, it’s AMS or Automatic Merchandising Systems Machines. They have come up with a very, very good program to comply with this law. One of the things that I want to just discuss is that the new firmware that they’re offering actually does more than just comply with this regulation, so we’ll get into it. A little bit is, Tom as you stated, that the government has required that we now have to put calorie counts on there before you make the selection on the machine. If you’ve got equipment out there, particularly older equipment, you’re going to have to come up with some kind of a system to do this.

Larry Towner: AMS has a system available now on their SENSIT 3 boards, which if you’re vending, you know about AMS and you know about the SENSIT boards. This is a retrofit to SENSIT that board that you can put on either a SENSIT 1 or a SENSIT 2 machine, but you can add the SENSIT 3 board to those machines. It’s of course going to cost you a little bit of money to do that. But if you’ve already got a SENSIT 3 board, what this is is this is a firmware update that will allow you to transfer your information to your machines via an SD card. The big advantages that I saw with this when I looked at this program was that you are able to make all of your, or input all of your data from your computer into the firmware program on an SD card and then you transport the SD card out to the machines.

Larry Towner: The real beauty of that is is that if you set your planograms up on your machines and if your planograms are all the same on all your machines, you can just walk up to that machine and in about a minute, you download the new firmware, including all your pricing and all your calorie information into each machine. The great advantage to that, if you know about reprogramming machines is is that in a minute you can do the whole machine and you can do multiple machines in the same amount of minute. In an older machine, I’ve spent a lot of my life in the older machines where you have to reprogram every single column every single time and it would take anywhere from 20 to 30 minutes to reprice, just to reprice the machine.

Larry Towner: So this is a tremendous resource for you to be able to go out and add a bunch of information onto your machines with just a very, very simple insert of the SD card and a download of your firmware onto that board. In talking to the people at AMS, you can load multiple planograms into your machine so you’re not limited to just one set. You can really, they say an unlimited number of planograms. I think you’re limited by the amount of the space you have on your SD card, but be that as it may, you can put a lot of planograms on a two gigabyte SD card.

Larry Towner: So the big advantage here is, I mean, even if it goes right down or if you want to just reprice your machines, you walk in, you plug that thing in, you set your prices in your office in your free time, and then you just go out and reprice all your machines. Wham bam, thank you ma’am and it’s done. Fantastic resource. Initial costs for an SD card in an adapter to plug it into your board is less than $100. In fact, it’s actually less than $50. So really, really good opportunity. Don’t have to do a whole lot of, don’t have to do any retrofitting, unless you’ve got a SENSIT 1 or SENSIT 2 board. But that’s the greatest advantage. Tom, do you have any questions on this program?

Tom: Well, I was going to ask you what it costs, but it sounds like it’s less than $50 per machine.

Larry Towner: No, it’s not per machine. I’m glad you asked that question. It’s not per machine. It’s you buy the adapter … It’s essentially an adapter cable and an SD card with the firmware on it. You buy that once, you change all your machines. So you’re amortizing that out over the cost of all the SENSIT 3 boards that you have out there in your rotation. So it’s not per machine, it’s a onetime fee.

Tom: I see. Well that’s great. So, that’s good. AMS’ all new machines obviously are going to have this. So that’s how you take care of the machines that don’t have it.

Larry Towner: Well, yeah. All the new AMS machines will have it. Now, Joe at A & A Equipment was telling me he will be retrofitting and anytime he does a refurb job on an AMS machine now, it’s going to have the SENSIT board installed in it. So when you’re looking at your refurbished equipment, just make sure to ask and say, “Does it have a sense at three board in it?” and you’ll be good to go.

Tom: Awesome. Anything else?

Larry Towner: Sounds like a fantastic program to me. It’s very simple to use. You can do it sitting at home on your computer, then you take it out. You can do multiple planograms, you can have … You can segment it by sit by season, by location, by however you want to do it. You can scroll through your various menu options on your on your SD board to see which planogram you actually want to put into that particular machine. So it gives you, really gives you ultimate flexibility and really … I mean, it really is not even a cost. It really is a very nominal costs. Essentially, the cost of an adapter cable and an SD card, which is it’s like 50 bucks. So what? If you’ve got 10 machines, that’s $5 a machine, piece of cake. Compared to some of the systems out there, that’s really, really, really a bargain.

Tom: Awesome. Alright, well thanks Larry. You’ve been watching Calorie Info Ams Vending Machines  the Vending Business Show, a production of A & m  Equipment Sales.

Larry Towner: Thanks, Tom.

More informative blogs How To Start A Vending Machine Business

Refurbished Coffee Machines

Refurbished Coffee Machines

Barry Wood:       Refurbished Coffee Machines   Along with snack machines, we also have Refurbished Coffee Machines  . On the inside we pull the tank and brewere clean the inside of the machine and sometimes paint the inside.  We then disassemble the brewer and tank.  Delime the tank and then comes the installation process.  All new water valves gaskets and any part that is not acceptable.  We check the operation of the tank and brewer before it is installed back into the tank.
Barry Wood:         All brewers are rebuilt with new parts. Your 8 1/4 inch caps fit easily in your dispenser here in front.
Barry Wood:         This Refurbished Coffee Machine blends four different flavors of coffee: Regular coffee, decaf, hot chocolate and french vanilla.
Barry Wood:         Again, this Refurbished Coffee Machine is painted inside and out, and on the sides, and the back. polycarbonate panels are installed  to give you a long-lasting, good-looking machine.
Barry Wood:         New graphics, pricing and labeling of the flavors that are available.  The machine is put on line and checked for at least 3 days to make sure the total operation of the machine checks out.  The only way to buy refurbished coffee machines is to rebuild them all the way.  If not you will run into a multitude of problems.  We know what to do and how to do it.

User Friendly Vending Machines

User Friendly Vending Machiones  Barry Wood: Hello, my name is Barry Wood. I’m part of the sales staff here at A&M Equipment.

Barry Wood: I want to show you a User Friendly Vending Machine  that we recommend to all people that are non-vendors for their own facility. It’s easy to program. This particular machine is painted on three sides. On the facings themselves, we put polycarbonate. It doesn’t scratch, it looks better longer. On the inside, you have a 40-selection machine here, along with five selections of gum and mints. Each machine is easy to load by virtue of drawers that come right out to your level, so you can put your products inside your helixes here.

Barry Wood:User Friendly Vending Machines   Programming itself, too, is also a snap just by pushing one button here and going to the front of your machine. On the inside, you have rebuilt Mars coin mix and validators. Mars is one of the most outstanding money-handling systems on the market. His little brother is a 32-select. Again, painted on three sides and on the inside, also, with polycarbonate on the facing. They program the same, they load the same. Again, your drawers pull out for easy loading. Mars coin mix and validators on the inside.

Barry Wood:  User Friendly Vending Machines  will give you years of great service. Thank you. For more information on different snack machines most of them User Friendly Vending Machines click on Snack Machines at the top of the page.  Thank you for watching User Friendly Vending Machines at the Vending Business Show.  For more blogs  New To The Vending Business?

Refurbished Vending Machines Work and Look Like New

5 Reasons Refurbished Vending Machines Work and Look Like New


An interview with Joe Nichols, owner of A & M Vending Machine Sales.


Joe Nichols- A Vending Veteran with over 40 years of vending knowledge explains how  A&M  refurbished vending machines look and act new.

We make our own polycarbonate trim, fronts, side and back panels for our refurbished vending machines.

 


EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:


Tom Shivers: I’m Tom Shivers with the Vending Business Show, here with Joe Nichols, owner of A&M Equipment Sales. Today we’re going to talk about refurbished vending machines, Joe, thanks for being here.

Joe Nichols: Thank you.

Tom Shivers: Well, what’s new in refurbished vending machines?

Joe Nichols: Well, there’s been a lot of different changes in the … in our refurbished vending machines, a lot of people don’t do it the same way we do it. When we refurbish a vending machine, we want it to look brand new, we like to remanufacture everything in the machine to where it would look and act like a brand new machine. What we have done to better remanufacture our machines is we make our own polycarbonate trim now, and what that does is it’s a black trim that we can put on, it stays on, you know, if somebody kicks it or bumps it, it’s got a little give power on it to where it stays on the machine, and it looks nice. With it being black trim, it doesn’t show dirt like silver and some other color trims. We are also putting on a front … polycarbonate fronts on the machines now called tough fronts.

Joe Nichols: What a polycarbonate front does is it’s also black and it doesn’t show dirt, it doesn’t show scuff marks, scratches, it’s a real durable type of finish. We also put … we manufacture our own polycarbonate side panels, back panels, and we put them on. There’s a trim that we put on the sides and the backs of the machines, and then 3M makes a product … looks like the old double stick tape but everything technology wise on adhesives have come a long way and it’s a roll of … looks like tape, it’s about a foot wide and we put them all on the side of the machine and then we stick this panel on and it’s just about like super glue, it’s almost impossible to pull off.

Tom Shivers: So … it kind of looked like a brand new machine then I guess when you’re done with that.

Joe Nichols: Yeah, once we get done with it, we have new side finishes, back finishes, front finishes, and everything outwardly … appearances look brand new and you know, if there’s a scratch piece or anything like that we replace it because we want our machines to look brand new. There’s a lot of guys out there that will say they are in the refurb business and they’re in the back of somebodies garage with a bunch of cans of spray paint and they don’t change any of the stuff out and when the customer gets it, it looks like a used car, you know. You’ve seen some of the used cars that don’t look that great and you know, have a lot of miles on them and everything else. On the inside we pull all the parts out, we paint the door, paint the inside of the machine, we’ve remanufacture the changer and validator because that’s where the dollar bills and the coins go.

Joe Nichols: Chances are that’s where a bulk of your problems are going to be, with those two pieces right there. So everything is remanufacture, you’ve got a years warranty on it, and we do it to the highest standards. What we’ve been doing lately is we’ve been putting new electronics on the machines and what that does is it brings the machine up to the newest standards, which is the MDB standards, which means we gut the machine as far as anything electronic, we gut the board, the main board, the disk lay, the touch pad, we put all new electronics on it. Brand new or remanufacture MDB changer, MDB validator, and we also put a thing called guaranteed delivery on the machine.

Joe Nichols: What that does is it goes right above the delivery bin where your products and your snack machine drop through, and this little force field that tells the machine that the product has been delivered to the customer in the delivery bin. Now if that product doesn’t drop through that force field, what it’ll do is the machine will say make another selection, you might have vended an empty selection, or it will give you your money back, whichever one you prefer. So you won’t … a lot of times … what it does is it makes it to where almost everybody gets what they want and with no refunds.

Joe Nichols: What you want is a happy customer, that’s what we want too. Another thing that we’ve come up with is we import LED lighting and I feel like ours is the best LED lighting in the business because it looks just like a fluorescent bulb, it’s real easy to change out, it’s got the transformer and everything built in, and what you do is you pull your old fluorescent bulb out with the starter. You put the new LED strip back in where the fluorescent light went and it comes on and it’s super bright, it makes your products look 3D to where it gives off a different color light, it’s like a white casting light, and it just makes your products pop. Anybody that walks by and sees your products, you’ll instantly want to buy more, and you’ll get about 10 and 15 percent more sales because of that lighting. Plus the light will usually … it will last between seven and ten years, so you don’t have to change your fluorescent lights as much.

Tom Shivers: What about energy efficiency for the refurbished machines?

Joe Nichols: Well, we don’t have as many things happening in that. There’s a few things that we can put on a machine, one is the LED lighting that we have, it can go on all the snack machines and it will … instead of pulling 100-110 volts, it pulls maybe 8 watts, so it can save energy. We also have a thing that we’re putting on the drink machines, if you want it, called a vin-mizer, and what a vin-mizer does on a drink machine, it goes on the back side of the vending machine, it’s a motion detector. There’s a board inside the machine and when the motion detector detects that there’s nobody in the break room and it’s been … nobodies been in there for a certain amount of time, it will cut your machine off for 30 or 45 minutes and then it’ll cut it back on to cool the drinks down, and it’ll keep doing that from time to time, say all night long or until somebody walks in the door.

Joe Nichols: Other than that as far as re-manufacturing machines, that’s about all we have. Now new machines we have boards that will also do that on food machines and snack machines and everything else to where they’ll cut on or do the same thing as the motion detector. The new machines also have a thing called a econo-cool, and you can get it on a drink machine, now you can get it on the new AMS food machines and the drink snack machines. What econo-cool is and I was just talking to the AMS engineer last week when we had a meeting up there is, instead of having a 5/8th horsepower compressor, you have a small 1/3rd horse power compressor and you have a board on that thing, on the compressor that instead of the compressor coming on real fast and having a voltage spike, it gradually comes on and goes off and the board monitors the compressor for energy efficiency. It also has an energy efficient condenser and an energy efficient evaporator fan motor, so it pulls a lot less power than a normal compressor.

Tom Shivers: Okay, and it’s econo-cool, is that what you called it?

Joe Nichols: Yeah, econo-cool.

Tom Shivers: Okay, well what else is new?

Joe Nichols: We’re coming up with the ADA regulations, it should be coming up in March, where all new manufacturers must come up with a handicapped accessible machines and what that means is a handicapped person shouldn’t … if he comes up to the machine, the height that he can put his coins in, his dollar bills, the touch pads, and everything else is 48 inches and the minimum amount is 15 inches, so he can come up to … with a wheel chair, put his dollar in, and be able to pull his product out with no problems. All the manufacturers are looking at that right now. I know AMS has come up with a new delivery bin, it’s kind of a roll type delivery bin where the product drops down in the delivery bin and he pushes the handle and the product comes up to where you can pull it out at a minimum [inaudible 00:10:35] of 15 inches. I heard that the Winner Group has got some kind of little elevator on theirs where you press the button and the product comes up and he reaches in and gets it.

Joe Nichols: So everybody is in the midst of trying to take care of those specifications right now so that’s one of the main things coming up. Everybody is looking at different colors of machines, I know the Crane Company come along with a silver, AMS has gone with a silver and black, the good thing about going with a silver and black instead of an all silver is people like to kick machines from time to time and if you have an all silver machine you get scuff marks on the machine and they are hard to get out. If you have a silver and black machine and you know, the bottom part of the machine is black, you don’t see the scuff marks as bad so I would prefer a silver and black or black or something like that compared to all silver.

Joe Nichols: It’s pretty at first but then after about six months to a year it starts looking a little haggard there.

Tom Shivers: Alright, well Joe thanks for sharing, tell us about your business and what you do?

Joe Nichols: Well, we’ve been in the vending industry for a long time, we’re some of the pioneers. My father started the vending business in Fort Pierce, Florida, in 1953. Of course I grew up in the vending business and started in 73. We were actually vendors, we went out and ran routes, build up machines and everything else and … 1981 we started buying tractor trailers of used machines, refurbishing them, and putting them on our routes and word go around town in Atlanta that we would sell used machines and we started selling them to different people, different customers, our competitors, and what happened was we’ve sold so many machines to so many different people that we couldn’t go out there and get new accounts because everybody was buying machines from us. So we decided about 10 years ago to get out of the vending business and just sell machines but we still have that … we still think like vendors.

Joe Nichols: We know that you’ve got to have parts very quickly if there’s a machine that goes down, you gotta have good quality commercial grade equipment in your locations, you don’t need any of the stuff from China or something where you can’t get parts. Anything that you buy from us, normally we have the parts in stock, we can ship that afternoon and you get them usually the next day or the day after. We have three what you might call technicians that man the phones from 8 to 5 Monday through Friday, they’ve been at it a long time. Like I said, we’re all old vending guys, we’ve seen just about everything good and bad in this industry. We know a lot and anybody that is thinking about getting in the business or is in the business and needs some help, we’d be glad to help you.

Tom Shivers: Okay. Well you’ve been listening to the Vending Business Show, a publication of A&M equipment sales.

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