Osborne Park showroom — counter staff who could never leave the floor

Trade and retail showrooms have a staffing problem that offices do not: the floor cannot be left uncovered. Counter and sales staff work continuous customer-facing hours, and every break has to be covered by someone else. In practice that means short breaks taken on site, not walks to a café, and it means the nearest food option is effectively irrelevant no matter how close it is.

In Osborne Park, with a trade counter running from early morning through to close and a mixed customer flow of tradespeople and retail walk-ins, the practical outcome was staff going without a cold drink for hours in a Perth summer. That is a WHS conversation as much as an amenity one.

Showroom placements have to satisfy two audiences that want different things. Staff need the machine close to the counter so a break is genuinely thirty seconds. The business needs it to not intrude on the customer-facing presentation of the floor. The resolution is usually a position in or beside the staff area on a line of sight from the counter, in plain black cabinetry rather than heavily branded livery.

Access was straightforward — roller door, level concrete, a straight run to the wall — which is typical of Osborne Park's light-industrial building stock and one reason installs in this corridor are usually completed in under an hour.

The planogram here looks nothing like a CBD office. Water and electrolyte drinks lead by a wide margin from November through March. Energy drinks move early. Savoury and protein lines — jerky, nuts, protein bars, larger-format chips — outsell confectionery, because staff are on their feet and buying something that functions as a meal replacement rather than a treat.

Where a showroom also serves trade customers, some volume comes from the customer side of the counter, which changes the mix again toward quick, familiar, single-purchase items. Telemetry separated the two patterns over the first cycle and the planogram was rebuilt on the data at the four-week review.

The showroom paid nothing: no machine cost, no delivery, no install, no restocking or service fee, no insurance premium and no contract. Public and product liability of $20 million sits with us. Cashless payment means there is no float to reconcile and no cash anywhere on the floor, which matters in a business already handling counter transactions.

Ongoing, the machine is monitored remotely for stock, temperature and faults, restocked on telemetry rather than a fixed calendar, and reviewed quarterly. If it ever stops earning its wall space, we move it or remove it at our cost.