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Towns out to limit or keep from sight the big and bright vending machines
Sunday, September 10, 2000 By Torsten Ove, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
Out on the sidewalk outside the Beaver Falls newsstand owned by Tim Mike and his mom, Joann, three machines offer cans of Coke and Pepsi for 35 cents each, about the best price anyone's seen this side of 1975.
But one of the machines must go.
Under an ordinance to be voted on later this month in Beaver Falls, two vending machines are OK as long as the store in question also sells the product inside.
But three? City leaders say that's too many in a community that has tried for years to tidy up its tired business district and polish its faded reputation.
"I think it's pretty petty," said Mike, a beefy guy in a ball cap standing behind the counter at J's News on Seventh Avenue. "God, don't we have enough problems in this town without them worrying about pop machines?"
But, said Vivian Genand, 72, a city council member and lifelong resident, "They just don't look right."
"They do nothing to enhance the main street," she said. "They don't look nice. That's my opinion, and I'm going to stick to that."
Vending machines may seem like a silly thing to get worked up about. And the truth is, most people probably don't give them much thought. One guy who bought a 35-cent Coke outside J's, for example, said he hadn't considered the issue. He just wanted a cheap Coke.
But these outdoor behemoths are sprouting like mushrooms across the land, and Beaver Falls has joined some other image-conscious towns in trying to regulate them.
The town of Mount Royal, Canada, in March banned any ad on an outdoor vending machine larger than 200 square centimeters. Describing the ads as a form of "visual pollution," the town council said the move was necessary because outdoor vending machines had reached "epidemic proportions." PepsiCo, the chief culprit, didn't like the new law but chose not to contest it.
Beaver Falls isn't facing that kind of proliferation. In addition to the machines in front of J's, there's one in front of the Sherwin Williams paint store, a couple in front of Family Dollar, a few more scattered here and there.
But some want to nip this trend before it gets out of control.
"What would it look like if people drove up the main street and saw 20 machines lining the sidewalk?" asked Paula Burdine, the city clerk.
It might look like the front of, say, Wal-Mart in Cranberry.
There, 12 vending machines are lined up like gaudy sentries at the front door, just like the seven on the sidewalk at the nearby Super Kmart and the four in front of the Giant Eagle across the way.
Don't expect any ordinances here, though. An assistant manager said no one had griped. As for the township, officials say Wal-Mart can line its store with 100 machines if it wants to because it's a private company.
"We don't regulate them," said Dan Horter, a codes officer. "There's nothing wrong with putting up 16 machines. People here like those machines."
These days you'll find hulking vending machines everywhere -- small-town sidewalks, big city streets, even state parks, including the clusters on both sides of the portal bridge at Point State Park.
Some industry people, at least, see it as a nonissue. Eddie Hicks of Albany, N.Y., past chairman of the National Automatic Merchandising Association, said, "I haven't heard of that many ordinances. It's more a rarity based on what I've seen."
Officials with Coca-Cola, which supplies merchants with machines in its continuing war with PepsiCo, said they hadn't received complaints from towns or cities.
"We don't think our machines are unsightly," said Lee Scott, vice president of public affairs for Coca-Cola Bottling Co. of Eastern Great Lakes, whose territory covers Pennsylvania, Ohio and Michigan. "We spend a lot of money to make our machines attractive. We've tried to provide the opportunity for people to have refreshment, and vending machines allow that 24 hours a day."
Tom McMann, the trade association's chief counsel, said he hadn't noticed a backlash, either, although he has seen a trend toward regulating a different kind of vending machine -- newspaper boxes. That became a hot topic in Pittsburgh last year, after which City Council approved a bill to create a task force to make the boxes less of an impediment for pedestrians.
Still, the growing number of outdoor machines, mostly offering cold drinks, has generated heat in some quarters.
In June, officials in Simi Valley, Calif., considered a measure to outlaw vending machines in front of stores unless they are shielded from public view.
"When a shopping center comes before us with a plan, they don't have pictures of vending machines in front," the planning commissioner told the Los Angeles Times. "Six months later, they have vending machines in front, and we didn't approve this. ... If you don't do something, they will be a block long."
Money, of course, is the reason. Vending is big business. Sales have jumped from $2.5 billion in 1960 to more than $34 billion in 1998, when Americans bought 21 billion cans of soda and 10 billion candy bars from machines.
The business has grown so much that Michigan State University has just started the first undergraduate course concentrating on the vending and office coffee service industries.
The industry is booming, said Hicks, in part because the machines are becoming more sophisticated. In the old days, machines had mechanical devices for collecting coins that often bogged down when they got dirty. That translated into lost coins.
Now, Hicks said, most machines have more reliable electronic components, although anyone who regularly uses them knows they still refuse bills, eat money and get jammed. "Seinfeld" built a show around that experience, with George Costanza suffering endless indignity in trying to obtain a Twix.
Another factor is diversity of the product. Instead of the usual lineup of drinks or stale peanut butter crackers, some vending companies are offering decent coffee and microwave meals that are actually digestible. And the fastest-growing product? Bottled water.
The trend toward more machines seems likely to continue, although it probably will never approach the mania the industry enjoys in Japan, where shoppers can buy underwear from machines.
Still, for merchants here, the machines are proven moneymakers.
In addition to its own Sam's Choice products, for example, Wal-Mart gets a percent of the sales from national companies such as Coca-Cola and PepsiCo. Smaller store owners get a piece of the sales pie, too, when they put a vending machine out front. Profits vary depending on product, price and volume, but merchants can take in as much as 30 cents for each 60-cent can of pop they sell.
Most outdoor machines in the United States sell drinks and are owned by big national companies, while smaller vending services generally supply indoor snack machines to hospitals, office buildings and institutions.
"Most of us don't like outdoor vending," said Bill Buckholz of Goodman Vending Service in Reading. "There's too much vandalism and there isn't that much sales volume in anything except cold drinks."
Still, no one whose livelihood depends on vending likes to see regulation.
"I think a store manager should realize that's an exceptional amount of equipment out there, but I don't think [an ordinance] is fair," Buckholz said.
Sometimes, municipalities themselves are to blame for the proliferation. In February, officials in Southlake, Texas, banned outdoor vending machines to preserve the "aesthetic quality" of the town. But in June, council approved a variance allowing machines in the main park so the city could collect 20 percent of vending sales from Coke.
The town council in Carrboro, N.C., took up the issue last year after receiving complaints from residents about lighted vending machine ads cluttering up the night-scape. Specifically, some residents complained about the new phenomenon of stringing together several machines, each sporting part of an illustration, so that a giant picture of, say, a Coke bottle comes into focus from a distance.
At night, these signs amount to minibillboards, which is the basis for protests against them in other parts of the country.
"Vending machines have gone from relatively innocuous, disappear-into-the-landscape boxes to these garish things 3 feet wide and 6 feet tall that are brightly lighted 24 hours a day," one angry Carrboro alderman told the local newspaper.
That kind of advertising is what you see in front of the Eckerd drug store in Beaver Falls, too, where six machines sit at the entrance, three of them displaying an image of a giant Coke bottle.
Those machines anger the Mikes, naturally.
"We have to get rid of one and Eckerd gets to keep theirs?" said Tim Mike. "They have a whole row of machines." Eckerd is private property, though, so the city can't do anything.
The new ordinance stemmed from an effort by city council to clean up its streets as part of its Safe Streets program. Loitering was the problem, and some merchants felt the pop machines were partly to blame.
Already on the books is an ordinance that allows store owners to sell merchandise on the sidewalk on certain days. Council interpreted "merchandise" to mean the same kind of items sold inside the store. Some businesses that had nothing to do with food or beverages didn't share that interpretation and installed pop machines. Even the Salvation Army put one up, although it's since been removed.
Originally, the new ordinance was going to limit merchants to one machine, but when the Mikes complained, council agreed to allow two. The Mikes are still irritated. "It's a crock," said Joann Mike, but they'll comply.
Meanwhile, council is sticking to its guns, even if it's inconvenient. Councilwoman Diane Ward, whose mother is Vivian Genand, said she was out walking recently with her 11-year-old son near J's News when the boy said he wanted a soda from one of the machines.
She wouldn't let him.
Instead, they walked four blocks to a convenience store and bought one there.
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