Dave Ward’s ‘Managing In Vending’ Blog continues with a wry look at unexpected outcomes and a thumbs-up for the AVA.
I need you to bear with me, because it’s not every day that an engineer who runs a vending company gets to pontificate on the Social Sciences.
Are you familiar with the phrase, ‘the law of unintended consequences’? It encapsulates three possible outcomes when something is done with the very best intentions…
First, there’s The Positive. You do something to make things better and as a result, other things get better too. Call it ‘serendipity’, if you like.
Then there’s The Negative. This is where your good intentions are realised, but as a consequence, something else happens that’s a problem in itself. For instance, irrigation projects have been created that enable otherwise unsuitable land to be cultivated. The downside is that the same projects can introduce water-borne diseases capable of decimating communities. Oops.
Finally, there’s The Perverse, also known as ‘The Cobra Effect’. Apparently, back in the days if the Raj, in a bid to control the cobra numbers, a bounty was put on them, ‘dead or alive’. Unfortunately, the rewards were so, well… rewarding, that people began to breed cobras so that they could be killed. Another oops.
Recently, I’ve experienced The Negative. My iPhone. All I did was install a software update, but that was enough to ensure that my iPhone would never again work with my car’s communications system. I’ve done everything humanly possible to get the thing sorted, but it stubbornly refuses to tow the line and do what it did just fine until I uploaded the software that was supposed to make it work better than ever.
I was spitting feathers, but I should be used to it. After all, we in the vending industry are old hands at dealing with ‘unintended consequences’. For instance, somebody in Whitehall (no doubt) decides that consumers have the right to be informed regarding the existence of allergens in any given product. Great idea. But how are we, in vending, supposed to handle that?
Consider this: we’re told that there’s about to be a new one-pound coin and that said new one-pound coin is being introduced for all the right reasons. I wasn’t aware until recently that coins aren’t changed on a whim. Counterfeit money has been a problem since, well, since we invented ‘money’ and when the counterfeit versions of a coin achieve a certain percentage of those in circulation, the plug on that coin has to be pulled. So, the forthcoming new coin is sensible. Unless, of course, you operate vending machines for a living, or your locker room works on pound coins, or your supermarket trolleys, or even your opera glasses…
I don’t want to abuse this platform, but I’m going to take this opportunity to speak up for the AVA when it comes to mitigating The Negative sort of unintended consequences. As Chairman, you’ll think I’m biased, but the effectiveness of the AVA as the industry’s advocate and lobbyist has meant that the pitfalls of well-intentioned change have not been as irksome as they might have been.
Take allergens for instance. Without the AVA’s intervention, we might have been required to come up with a sticker for every product in the machine, instead of one sticker per machine.
Without the AVA, vending machines might have been included in the (otherwise) blanket ban on F Gas. It’s been outlawed in domestic fridges and elsewhere but that AVA was able to speak up about the consequences this worthwhile legislation would have on vending and consequently, we’ve been given some latitude.
And as for the new coins, the AVA is forging links with the people who make these decisions and consequently, they know that certain design ideas can’t be adopted, because coin mechanisms wouldn’t be able to accept them.
Now, if only the AVA could get my iPhone talking to my car again…
* Dave Ward is MD of N&W and Chairman of the AVA
