While traditional retailers are struggling to survive by scaling down or shutting their Hong Kong stores, vending machines are enjoying something of a boom. Some shopping mall and office landlords are slashing the rent they charge operators to install their machines in prominent areas, because they enable transactions without physical contact and draw traffic. Vending machines selling lunchboxes and surgical masks have recorded brisk sales during the Covid-19 crisis , a trend never seen in Hong Kong before. EC Bento has got around the rent issue entirely by arranging to provide landlords with market data in exchange for setting up in their space. The new company has recently installed vending machines selling hot lunchboxes at 20 locations including Exchange Square and New World Tower in Central. Some landlords request discounts or coupons for tenants. “Frankly speaking, a vending machine may occupy [an area the size of] two tiles. How much rent can they charge me? They cannot possibly charge me HK$100,000 (US$12,902) for that, right?” said founder Jerry Lam. “They may only get a few thousand [in rent] from the two tiles. But getting big data for tenant analysis may be even more important to developers.” The company’s machines sell close to 1,000 lunchboxes a day now. They cost HK$49 to HK$62, which may be reduced to HK$28 at dinner time. With every purchase, the machine collects data for analysis by artificial intelligence . Lam said his vending machines can collect data for “big data analysis” on users’ meal patterns, tastes and personalities and give consumers recommendations. “Some developers have been very proactive in cooperating with us to analyse big data so they can have more marketing [intelligence] for their own tenants,” he said. “This is their advantage. This is a win-win situation.” Another vending machine company, FreshUp, has struck three times as many deals to supply its services this year as last year, and seen an even a bigger jump in enquiries. It has cooperated with companies like New World Development and The Kowloon Motor Bus Company to install machines distributing face masks. The MaskOn project, a pop-up stall selling masks in Times Square, lent exposure to the brand and its products, attracting foot traffic of more than 10,000 a day. It is “not rare” for a rented vending machine to exceed HK$100,000 in sales per month and close to 1,000 transactions per week with the “right product and right location”, according to the company. Generally speaking, shopping malls would share about 15 per cent of the turnover, said David Lam, chief executive of FreshUp, which has some 2,000 machines across the city. Before the outbreak, the malls might have charged about HK$3,000 per machine slot. Traditional retailers usually need to pay a base rent too. The pandemic “sped up” the process of landlords “adopting vending machines as a strategy” as the machines are “versatile” and essentially “incur no cost” to the malls. “Previously during the pandemic, shops were mostly closed, the malls were dead silent. Having those machines would be good [as] they run 24/7,” added Lam. The machines can be fitted with 50-inch full screens to play the mall’s commercials and have small games installed. Link Reit, Asia’s largest real estate investment trust, has seen an increase of about 5 per cent in the floor area taken up by vending machines in its Hong Kong portfolio so far this year. The trend reflected “solid organic growth” during the period, said a company spokesman, adding “some merchants also see them as a cost-effective way to evaluate market interest in their new products”.