You know those gadget vending machines that are showing up in airports? I’d like to see them show up at the most popular sand volleyball courts, capitalizing on my need for a good volleyball when I wind up at such a court without one. What began as a random impulse this morning evolved into yet another venturing daydream. I would pay a premium to rent a good ball by the hour. I would even risk a premium payment to ultimately purchase the ball if I forgot to return it or returned it in a condition that didn’t pass the vending company’s return standards. This return audit could happen some time later, once the vending company has a chance to inspect the ball. I would use an app to rent the ball and await my fate on the inspection after returning it. If I failed the inspection audit, the company would mail me the ball and charge my account the purchase balance relative to the original rental payment.

Using reasonable quality volleyballs is probably the best call, as they would expand the market by satisfying the high end and providing a good experience for the low end of the market. A rental fee of $5 per hour seems like a great convenience and a great profit opportunity for a ball whose cost could be below $25. One downside of this choice is that the purchase price could intimidate the low end of the market (e.g., $60 for a Spalding King of the Beach), but the benefits of a single product SKU could compensate.

The cost of the vending machine operation is central to the business model. Offering other convenience goods in the same machine could help with infrastructure cost payback, but if the rental and inspection process forces the vending machine to hold an inventory of balls that can be rented once, then returned to await inspection, there would be less space in the vending machine to sell other goods.

A way to reduce power consumed by the vending machine: allow the machine to be user-activated. Use bright colors that allow the machine to be seen well enough without fancy lighting running all day and all night. Use a nice glass that allows reasonable viewing from a distance to draw in customers. Then have a button that activates lighting on a limited timer so that the purchase experience is well-lit, but then the energy consumption goes back to zero when the machine is idle. This is the best idea in this blog…and it is probably already widely used, but if not, I called it first! An extension of this concept is to have a battery-operated radio on continuously, signaling for a charging cycle from the main power when needed, and therefore the whole system can be pinged for data at any time from the central service.

Security is probably the biggest hurdle. Airports have attracted high-end vending machines because there is high traffic from an attractive market (those that can afford a plane ticket) and they are heavily patrolled with security. Those vending machines sitting out on the beach at dusk, all alone…are begging for theft. There are probably advances in secure vending machines with adequate viewing glass…but this seems like the biggest obstacle, along with the issue of having enough traffic to drive enough volume to produce profit, as opposed to subsidizing the convenience of having a nice ball to hit when you happen to be on the beach…