From the supplier area (Connection Hub) to the line-up of speakers to the education sessions, NAMA's CTW for 2024 has been reimagined to help operators thrive in today's changing OCS climate.

In this episode of Automatic Merchandiser’s Vending & OCS Nation, the podcast for the convenience services industry, presented in cooperation with NAMA -it’s all about the upcoming CTW – the Coffee Tea and Water event, scheduled for December 11th and 12th in New Orleans.

NAMA's CTW 2024 has been designed specifically for operators and suppliers to collaborate on how to elevate OCS and Pantry offerings and evolve the client relationship, moving beyond trusted service provider to essential business partner.

Podcast host Bob Tullio sat down with two people who were very involved in the planning of the event – Linda Saldana of Seventh Wave Refreshments, the chairperson of Stakeholder Task Force that reimagined the new CTW and Tom Steuber of Associated Services, who also happens to be Chairperson of the NAMA Board of Directors.

Two things will be clear to you after listening to this podcast. Operators are excited about smart market technology and there is no end to the creative solutions/equipment being offered by smart market developers.

In this episode of Automatic Merchandiser’s Vending & OCS Nation, the podcast for the convenience services industry, host Bob Tullio takes an even deeper dive into the world of smart markets. In part one of this episode, released on September 24th, he talked to Ryan McWhirter of 365 Retail Markets, Elyssa Steiner from Cantaloupe and Yang Yu from Micromart.

In “Smart Markets Part II - Choosing a smart market is a multiple-choice question for operators,” Tullio talks to more smart market developers, creative minds who are driving the smart market movement. Mike Delazzer, founder of Redbox is now with Instant Retail Systems, Detlev Goedbloed of Structural Concepts, Fred Kahn from Kooick and Guy Moshe from Shekel, all share their product features and their vision for the future of smart markets.

Mike Jamison from New Age Vending and Jon Corto from Buffalo Strive give their take on the value of smart markets. Also mentioned in this podcast, Due North and AVS, two companies who play an important role for smart market developers.

From day one, theft has been a concern for micro market operators. Watching hours of video or taking a time consuming and perfectly executed market inventory are two ways to establish whether theft is occurring, but then what? Proving your case to the client and gaining their support is the difficult next step.

In this episode of Automatic Merchandiser’s Vending & OCS Nation podcast, host Bob Tullio talks to three companies who use advanced technology, including AI, to identify theft as it happens and make it easier for operators to have that difficult conversation about product theft with their customer. The goal is better communication, cooperation, deterrence and in some cases, compensation.

According to the 2023 Automatic Merchandiser State of the Industry Report, there are over 42,000 active micro markets being operated in the US. Since the very first micro market was placed over a decade ago, product theft, aka “shrink” has been an active topic of conversation and an ongoing challenge for just about every operator.

In that same study, operators were asked to identify their average level of micro market theft. While 3% optimistically said they were at a 0% shrink, the vast majority fell into the 3% to 7% range.

One might conclude from the report that the shrink situation isn’t that bad and generally speaking, operators have it under control. Those three companies that are using advanced technology to monitor security and catch thieves in micro markets would beg to differ. Panoptyc, ProWatch Solutions and Theft Detective have all experienced different journeys on their way to catching a thief. Today, they can offer hard evidence that theft is an inherent issue in micro markets and unless strong deterrents are in place, along with effective communication – shrink happens in a big way.

While this podcast takes a deeper dive into the issue of micro market theft and efforts to deter it, many of the interviews were also conducted for the Automatic Merchandiser article that Tullio wrote for the magazine’s upcoming November, “Protecting your investment - A technology driven approach to mitigating micro market theft.”