And while the Bellevue, Wash., company would not comment on its plans, advertisements for the job posted on the Internet this month indicate Coinstar is trying to develop partnerships in the beauty and cosmetics industry and to develop vending machines that eventually might be [image-nocss] rolled out nationwide, the report added.
"We are continually looking at new opportunities in the self-service, automated retail space and plan to have a number of seed businesses that we're testing and evaluating at any given time," Coinstar said in an email statement to the news agency. "It would be premature to provide comment on any of these early concepts."
The venture would jibe with the company's efforts to test various automated retailing concepts as it seeks growth opportunities aside from its mature coin-counting business and its Redbox Automated Retail movie-rental kiosks, Merriman Curhan Ford & Co. analyst Eric Wold told Dow Jones. "They definitely need to get into something to diversify the company," he said.
Redbox "still has a pretty good, solid three or four years of growth left in terms of new machines before starting to hit a wall," he said. Redbox's approximately 22,000 kiosks at grocery stores, McDonald's Corp. (MCD) restaurants and convenience stores and its dollar-per-night movie rentals have added to competition faced by movie-rental giant Blockbuster Inc. and by-mail service Netflix Inc.
But Coinstar has pulled back on other diversification efforts, divesting its E-Pay business, which sold prepaid cards for telecom services and retail products, in May. Wold said that he expects Coinstar to sell its money-transfer business, too.
He noted Coinstar has been developing automated coffee kiosks since 2007, when it began testing a kiosk with Starbucks (SBUX) through the company's Seattle's Best Coffee brand. Last year, Coinstar said it had rolled out about 85 coffee kiosks to grocery and convenience-store customers, but it said in April it is now working on a second-generation machine that will be less expensive to produce and easier for consumers to use. (Click here for previous CSP Daily News coverage.)
Andclick here to view pictures of the coffee kiosks.
"What cosmetic brands have been doing is trying different formats of reaching the consumer," Karen Grant, beauty industry analyst at NPD Group, told Dow Jones. Beauty brands have done well on the Internet, she said, and that has prompted many companies to look for other such alternative channels.
Kiosks or vending machines are not a huge trend as yet, she said, although they do have aspects that make them a viable option for cosmetic sales. Women tend to spend a lot of their beauty budgets on replenishing their stocks of brands they already own or know, which can make vending machines convenient options, she added.
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