You asked who handleswhat. Here's the line,item by item.

A building looking at a lobby market sent me four questions in one message last week, and they were the four best questions I have been asked all year. Who fixes it when it breaks. Who cleans it. What happens when somebody is charged for something they did not take. And who sends me the sales numbers. Not one of them was about the shelf.

They are really one question — what lands on my desk once this thing is in my building? — and it is what an amenity gets judged on in month six, long after anybody remembers the launch. Here is the whole division of labour, line by line, including the one line the industry's own paperwork almost always leaves blank.

Start with the line nobody checks: whose name is on the permit

In Clark County a market or cooler selling food is a permitted operation, and whose name is on that permit is the cleanest single indicator of where responsibility sits. The Southern Nevada Health District's vending machine health permit application is filled out by the operating company. It asks for the corporation or LLC name, which must match the business licence, and requires the operator to supply "proof of ownership in the form of a lease, deed, or other legal document granting permission for the permit applicant to operate at the specified physical location." The district's 2023 food regulations define the permit holder as "the person that is legally responsible for and possesses a valid health permit to operate the food establishment." A new installation gets a plan review, and the equipment has to show proof it meets NAMA or ANSI/NSF standards for sanitation.

So the regulatory exposure belongs to the operator by design: your building grants permission to operate, and that is the extent of your part. And for the facilities manager quietly dreading this — an unmanned machine selling packaged food is not required to have a handwashing sink, a mop sink or a restroom. Nobody is about to ask you to add plumbing to a lobby.

Repairs: the question the industry's own paperwork leaves blank

I read what the industry tells buildings to expect here — three of the widely circulated placement-agreement guides and the 2026 state-of-the-industry survey. All of them agree on who is responsible: in operator-owned arrangements the operator handles stocking, cleaning, routine maintenance and repairs, and one guide's responsibility matrix puts installation, maintenance, customer transaction support, revenue reporting and equipment removal in the operator's column. Not one gives a response time. One tells buildings to "confirm a defined response time" and offers no figure to compare against. Another asks "who repairs a damaged payment terminal?" and leaves it unanswered, then lists "repeated equipment failure" as grounds for termination without defining repeated — a right you could never exercise. The survey does not address repair at all.

Everyone agrees repairs are the operator's job. Almost nobody will tell you how fast. Those are two different promises, and only the second is worth anything at eight in the morning when the door will not open.

Ask for the second one, from us or from anybody: a named response window, in writing, with different windows for different faults, because they are not the same emergency. A cooler that will not unlock is urgent. A reader declining cards is urgent. A dark header screen is not. Then ask who you call — a named person in the valley, or a queue in another state — and what recourse you have if a fault is still open a week later.

Our side: the equipment is ours for the life of the installation rather than the life of a warranty, your site sits on a fixed weekly route, and you get one named contact in town instead of a support portal. The windows themselves go in writing with the rest of the terms after the call, because they depend on the site. I would not take them verbally from any operator, including me.

Cleaning: two jobs that get confused for one

The equipment — cabinet, glass, shelves, every food-contact surface, and the sanitation standard the health district inspects against — is the operator's, every visit. That is not a favour, it is the condition of the permit. The floor around it and the room it stands in are your housekeeping, exactly as before.

The honest wrinkle: a market changes a room's waste profile. People who used to leave the building for lunch now eat in it, so a bin sized for a room where nobody ate is often undersized by week three. Ask any operator what their plan for that is — it is a fair test of whether they have run one before.

Bad charges: the line that quietly defaults to your front desk

Of the four questions this is the one I would weight most heavily, because it is where a vague answer burns your time rather than the operator's. The norm itself is unambiguous. The operator processes refunds, not the location where the equipment sits — one widely read industry FAQ puts it exactly that way, adding that a location handles it only "as a courtesy." The payment platform's consumer guidance says anyone questioning a charge should contact the operator directly, and that "the operator's contact information should be found on the machine at which you made your purchase."

Read those together and the failure mode is precise. If the operator's details are not on the unit, the customer does not know who to call — and the same guidance tells them what to do next: ask the location's management, the office manager, building security. That is how one missing sticker turns your front desk into a refund desk, permanently, for a service you do not operate and cannot look up. Worth knowing too: on a card statement these purchases appear under the payment platform's name, not your building's or ours, so somebody will query one.

And if the system does charge somebody for something they did not take, that risk sits with us and the platform we build on — never with your employee or resident to argue about, and never with you to mediate. How the equipment decides what came off the shelf explains why.

The numbers: ask for the statement before the total

One sentence from those placement guides deserves reading twice. It advises confirming "whether the location owner receives a sales statement." Whether. In a document written to help buildings negotiate, the existence of reporting is an open question.

So ask for four things in the agreement: a statement on a stated cadence, arriving without you requesting it; gross sales for a defined period; every deduction named rather than netted invisibly; and the right to question a line. A commission you cannot audit is not a commission, it is a number somebody tells you. For what happens between the shelf and a building's cheque, where that money actually goes is the companion piece.

The eight questions, in order

Take the list, if nothing else. An operator who answers all eight without hedging is telling you something real.

One. Whose name is on the health permit and business licence, and do they match? Two. What is the written response window for a unit that will not open, and is it different for a payment fault? Three. Who do I call, and is that person in the valley? Four. Who cleans the equipment, how often, and what is the plan for the extra waste? Five. Are your details on the unit, and does a refund reach you without touching my staff? Six. Who carries the risk on a wrong charge? Seven. What statement do I get, how often, and what is on it? Eight. Who owns the equipment, who insures it, and what happens the day it comes out?

Your own side of the line stays short — a wall, a standard outlet, access for a weekly restock — but pin down the three items the industry guides themselves call negotiated rather than settled: electricity, property security, and insurance, which that same matrix lists as "usually operator." Convert that usually into a certificate you have seen.

None of this is the interesting part of a market, but it decides whether the amenity is still a good idea a year later. If you are still working out whether a market or a cooler fits the building at all, the headcount tool on the homepage answers that in about a minute, including telling you to wait. If you would rather put the eight questions to a person, the form below reaches me directly and I will answer all eight in writing.