AN INTERVIEW WITH Dale Barebo
DALE Barebo
In this episode of the Vending Business Show, we interview Dale Barebo, a successful vending operator, and vending sales manager.
He shares Common vending machine repairs issues with validators and changers & The major brands of validators and changers available today
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:
Tom Shivers: I’m Tom Shivers with the Vending Business Show, here with Dale Barebo, Sales Manager of Phoenix Vending Systems, and today we’re going to talk about vending machine repairs, validators, and changers. So, Dale, thanks for being here.
Dale Barebo: No problem, thank you for having me. Let’s Talk about vending machine repairs
Tom Shivers: What vending machine repairs are easy for vending operators to perform on as it relates to their vending machine validators and changers?
Dale Barebo: Well, I would say that any vending machine repairs is fairly simple. When they get out to a machine it’s just a matter of not panicking and not getting upset. To diagnose it correctly and see if it’s taking money. If it’s not taking money, check and make sure that it’s clean. Just generally a damp cloth to wipe out the bill path or wipe out the coin path. Then, number one thing I always recommend for people to do, is simply just power the machine down, count to 10, power it back up and try it again. It’s just like your computer at home. The hard drive is gonna crash. It’s gonna lock up. It’s gonna lose its memory. You power it down, you power it back up. It’s reset and it’s up and working. And that’s the number one thing I always tell people to look for.
Tom Shivers: Okay.
Dale Barebo: It’s pretty simple.
Tom Shivers: All right, well, that’s easy.
Dale Barebo: It is very easy, and it’s not rocket science to work on these machines. It’s just, like I say, if you don’t panic, use a little common sense. You look for the problem that exists and a lot of the times I’m gonna say 70% of the time it’s dirt related. 20% of the time it’s something simple that there’s a dollar bill stuck in the bill path, there’s a coin in the coin jam. And 10% of the time it’s a problem that you’re going to need outside help, in which case you just remove the validator, you remove the change, and you put a replacement in, and you send it in and we get it repaired and send it back to you.
Tom Shivers: Yeah. I imagine there’s a number of common do-it-yourself repairs that vending operators could handle or even … not just vending operators, but anybody who owns a machine.
Dale Barebo: Correct, and I always tell everybody, anything we do you can do. It just comes down to, there’s a knowledge base that you have to have, but beyond that, cleaning is the big thing, like we talked about. 70% of it is gonna be dirt related, and if they can manage on a semiannual basis or once a quarter, to just get in there and just, when they’re servicing the machine just take those corrective measures to clean the coin path, to clean the bill path, to dust it off a little bit. They’re going to save themselves so much time and so much money because it’s gonna reduce the breakdown, and dirt is the enemy. Coins are dirty, dollar bills are dirty, people’s hands are dirty. That path is off and it gets into those things.
Dale Barebo: And that’s the big general maintenance things that most folks can do. As far as taking it out of the machine and taking it back to a bench and tearing it apart, yeah, you can do that, but again it might get more complicated, and you may not have the replacement parts. But, we sell the parts if you need them. If you break something it’s no big deal. Everything is replaceable on those units. There’s nothing that isn’t manufactured that we don’t have replacement parts for.
Tom Shivers: Okay, good to know. Well, what major brands are available?
Dale Barebo: Well, the major brands that are out there, basically, are gonna be Coinco and Mars. Those are the two major brands. There’s some other brands, such as Conlux and JCM and CashCode and all those. And we certainly look at all of those and we can repair most of those, and if we don’t there’s other service centers that can. Pretty much the major brands, the major players are Coinco and Mars and Conlux, and those guys produce probably most of the validators and coin changers that are out there, and those are usable in all manufacturers of machines, from Automatic Products, Dixie Narco, Vendo, Royal Vendors, [AMF 00:04:25]. Every machine that’s out there are gonna use the same changers, the same validators. There’s just different connections that hook into ’em, and again, today’s market is mostly [MVB 00:04:15] on the new stuff. The older stuff we carry replacement parts. We can fix those. There’s different models that go in there, and the manufacturers have made similar models that cross over.
Tom Shivers: So, Coinco, Mars, and Conlux.
Dale Barebo: I would recommend those three, yes.
Tom Shivers: Okay. Well, anything else you can share with us?
Dale Barebo: Well, I always just tell folks if they need anything to give us a holler. We do customer education programs that come out to your facility and help you guys do things. We have some criteria for that but they can call us and we can certainly talk to ’em. We don’t mind talking to folks over the phone to try to talk them through problems that they might have and source them in the right direction to help them out. No charge for that. So, we try to help you out.
Tom Shivers: Okay, great. Super. So, y’all are Phoenix Vending Systems. How do people get in touch with you?
Dale Barebo: Well, they can get ahold of us at 1-888-858-8583, and we consider ourselves an obsolete equipment repair company, meaning we can fix anything that’s been produced probably since the mid ’50s up until today, and certainly we carry all replacement parts for those things. We offer a one-year warranty on everything we fix, and we do a fixed price program for you guys that will do a … you know what it costs you when you send it in. So, it’s pretty basic and pretty simple. We got different programs for different sized companies. All they have to do is give us a call and we can certainly talk to them over the phone about that.
Tom Shivers: Awesome. You’ve been listening to the Vending Business Show, a publication of A&M Equipment Sales.
