Planet Vending is delighted to bring you the latest blog post by N&W MD and AVA Chair DAVE WARD, (pictured above).
I can’t help but think that there’s going to be a shadow hanging over Vendex this year… I’m not referring to the show or to the venue: I’m referring to the forthcoming referendum.
Let’s face it, we’ve had a tough year. The problems of the ‘Big Boy’ operating companies have been well-documented and a lack of cash in the industry in general means that sales of new machines have not recovered quite as we’d hoped. There’s already some caution in the marketplace, and now this.
It’s the lack of certainty that’s the real problem. ‘In’ or ‘out’, life will go on – but we may find ourselves in one of those situations in which Spock would turn to Captain Kirk and say ‘it’s life, Jim but not as we know it.’
Who do you believe when it comes to Europe? The PM comes back from Brussels with ‘a done deal’, the other side, pantomime style, insists ‘oh no it isn’t!’ Then the EU bureaucrats have their say, subsequently the ‘leave’ campaign hacks their ideas to pieces, and then the IMF puts in its three-pennorth…
Who do you believe when it comes to Europe? The PM comes back from Brussels with ‘a done deal’, the other side, pantomime style, insists ‘oh no it isn’t!’
Where all that leaves the average vending operator in the UK, or their suppliers – or their machine manufacturers for that matter – is, well… In limbo.
Like you, I suspect, I can’t put my hand on my heart and choose one option over the other. Personally, I’m a big fan of what the EU has done from an economic perspective, but politically, it’s my view that it’s a basket case.
I know that organisations like the EU aren’t run in the same way that you and I run our businesses, but if we followed the EU’s lead, we’d have no businesses left to run!
There are some of us old enough to remember the time before the UK was in the EU. Taking samples across borders, for instance, was fraught with hassle. We had to use something called a carnet. It was a document that you had to have if you wanted to import certain goods to countries without paying customs duty. It was a nightmare: at every border the carnet had to be checked and the border officials were required to sign your goods in. Then they had to sign them out again when you returned home.
I have a friend who worked in TV and he remembers the ‘sheer hell’ of taking a film crew abroad. Every single item of equipment, from camera bodies to microphones to lenses, had to ‘counted out and counted back’ – sometimes up to 300 individual pieces of kit, all listed on the carnet – including ‘the damned serial numbers’! It would take the crew’s PA a couple of days to compile such a list and even that was no guarantee of easy passage between nations: he remembers a three-hour stand-off at an airport because one piece of kit had gone missing.
I wouldn’t want to go back to that. The thought of it makes me shudder.
On the other hand, I’m not sure that a federalised Europe, with even more decisions being taken in Brussels rather than in Westminster, would be a good thing.
So, we’ll have to wait and see. Whatever happens, people will always require food and drink at work so we’ll all still be in business. We might just have to play to a slightly different set of rules… It may be that ‘it’s vending, Jim, but not as we know it.’
See you at Vendex.
