Automatic Age

14
T he A
u t o m a t ic
A
ge
there is little excuse for an operator habitually leaving a machine
empty. Pennies are dropped in and there is an enemy made for
the whole industry. W e have heard it predicted that the time is
close at hand when laws and ordinances will be passed prohibiting
any machine being in a public place that will not return the coin
when empty. That movement has already started and unless the
operators wake up they are going to find their routes put out of
business.
Some of the
Board of Health
regulations are a good thing in the long
run. It is true that they put the operators to some expense and
at first they seem to be down-right unfair and a nuisance. Yet,
from the appearance of some vending machines and the dirty way
in which they are kept they are an injury to the business. Dirty
restaurants do not do the restaurant business any good, and cer­
tainly dirty peanut and gum machines will not attract the best
class of trade. It is well known that the sanitary machines do the
best business. The regulations making them sanitary should not
be fought, but regulations designed purely to put them out of
business at the instigation of merchants who imagine they are
competitors should be contested.
Get Together
On Locations
W e heard, last month, an operator telling
about a location war in an eastern city. Operators in order to
get business away from one another, gradually jumped the store
keeper’s commission up from twenty to fifty per cent. Gradually
one after another went out of business. It is a poor game to play
to try to get rich by putting some one else out of business. It
would have been better to get together. Sometimes the operators
cannot get together because of hatred toward each other. In that
case some live jobber should make it his business to get all the
operators together in his vicinity. Jobbers can be of genuine
service to the men in a thing of this kind, and justify their reason
to exist. Without prosperous operators there would be no jobbing
business to do.
© International Arcade Museum
http://www.arcade-museum.com/