Redboxes are feeling blue?
So our local Wal-Mart has been undergoing some renovations lately. New flooring, new paint, new layout, etc. One thing we noticed one day was that they were hauling the Redbox kiosks out. Being that I’m watching the industry we followed where they went and they just went around to the front of the store next to the other vending machines instead of being right behind the registers. But what happened next week really surprised me. They color-changed the kiosks! They are no longer red but blue!
I have often referred to the Blockbuster Express and MovieCube kiosks as the “bluebox” but this makes it hard when Wal-Mart paints redboxes in their shade of blue! It seems to be the same sort of idea that Wal-Mart is doing with the E-Play kiosks which look like they are branded as Wal-Mart’s with the Wal-Mart blue and even the logo at the top. Wonder if we will see other stores color changing theirs. Anyone else spotted any like this!?
August 6th, 2009 at 9:01 am
When I interviewed Wal-Mart spokesperson Melissa O’Brien for this story – http://kioskmarketplace.com/article.php?id=22480 – she told me that the retailer has started requiring that all of the kiosk and vending machine companies it works with brand the machines with Wal-Mart colors, etc. She said it was a recent initiative and that it was going to be gradually implemented in all of the stores.
The front part of the stores are their “leased-space” vestibules, so the kiosk companies using that space have leases and revenue-share agreements with Wal-Mart, I believe.
August 6th, 2009 at 10:16 am
Hey Caroline! Yes, Wal-Mart and any other place that has the kiosks is in a revenue sharing agreement with the provider. They get a certain percentage of the revenue of the machine. The contracts I have seen have a sliding scale where the amount they get changes as the revenue of the kiosk changes. I have the same agreement type for my video games (http://www.mechcorps.com/html).
It is also interesting that they have moved all of the revenue share items into one location when they used to be scattered throughout the store. But this policy is unfortunate for providers such as Redbox who use the color of their kiosks as the primary portion of their branding!
August 16th, 2009 at 5:41 pm
[...] In 2008 Walmart removed the star from the logo and added a yellow sun-like shape. This new logo represents the change happening in stores now. Stores are now more “inviting and accessible”. The bold blue has moved to a softer shade and now taken over the store. Even the Redbox’s at Walmart are Blue. You can read more about that over at Inside Blockbuster Express. [...]