News

Grocery chain replaces video rental counter with DVD kiosks

April 25, 2007

PISCATAWAY, N.J. — E-Z Movie Rental, headquartered in Utah, used to have an established video rental service in the Foodland grocery store chain in Hawaii, and in other states across the continental U.S. In an attempt to streamline its business and reduce costs, E-Z Rental is slowly phasing out the shelf rack rental model and replacing it with ELO's automated DVD rental Kiosks.

"When you consider the costs of purchasing the titles, the labor involved in stocking the shelves and the fees paid to the store, the movie rental business has become less attractive as we have seen returns diminish overtime. Now, with these kiosks, we provide our customers the same great service but we increase our profit margins substantially," said Don Smart, chief executive of E-Z Movie Rental. "We have managed to squeeze a 200-300 square foot space into the DVmatic 550 that has a foot print of only 9 square-feet. It is really unbelievable."

Smart has been successfully operating the DVmatic kiosks at a few Foodland locations and is contemplating replacing his shelf space with ELO's kiosks at all of his locations. The kiosks are Web-based and allow customers to reserve movies on-line and then go pick them up at the machine.

The Westin Ka'anapali Ocean Resort Villas (Maui, Hawaii) also has adopted one of ELO's DVD rental kiosks to provide the rental service to vacationers who are staying at the resort.

"Resorts must compete for vacationers by differentiating themselves," said Jeff Swanson, owner of the machine. "By providing this DVD rental service we accomplish two things - make the resort more attractive to vacationers and hopefully sell more time shares, and eliminate the hassle of dealing with patrons renting and returning movies while allowing the machine to do all the work."

The rental price at the resort is a whopping $6.00 per day. Jeff says that since resorts have a captive audience, customers are willing to pay a high premium for convenience.