Great thread @Pecos! I just read virtually the whole thing top to bottom- I'm not an operator but just a pinhead who finds it fascinating to see how you make this work as a business. And it is a lot of work! Congratulations on keeping pinball in the public eye.

Regarding your rival vending company sales manager: that was gutsy of you to take him to lunch and talk about the market. The fact that he feels threatened by you is a sign that you are gaining traction. You're able to hustle sufficiently to keep your pins working, which is more than he can say for even his video game! You mentioned to him that some of your customers would be interested in video games--I think you were sharing that information for his benefit. But realistically, you could operate video games in your venues far better than he could. And hey, it could really improve your earnings at existing locations--you have put so much work into Hotrods Old Vail that perhaps you could add a crowd-pleaser like Ms. Pac Man or Galaga, and get some nice returns. There could be real value also in providing a game for non-pinball people: if the wife is playing pinball and the husband wants to leave, it benefits you to place another machine there that can occupy his time.

FWIW, I don't think you have any actual obligation to keep confidential what your business rival said to you (especially when he was rebuffing your offer). But you are discreet and don't want to overshare, which absolutely makes sense.

Random thought: It is awful that you have to drive out to the location to learn that your machines need maintenance or, worse, are unplugged. It's not actually the 1970's anymore, notwithstanding these great pins. It would be great if there were a cheap coin-tracking device you could put into a game to give you audit data about when people play. You could see how many repeat customers you have, what the hot times are, whether the game is broken or not earning, etc. Theoretically it could just be a simple device piggybacking off the coin mech with some USB storage in it. If it had wifi, it could even send you the data on a daily basis. Perhaps there's an android app that could do this- you could just put an old $40 android phone in the cabinet, powered, wifi connected, with a simple connection to the coin mech, to report audit data to you over the internet. But that's just me daydreaming.

Also interesting about the silicone rings in Black Knight. It would be great to have that reliability in all your games, since broken rubbers are a frequent issue. But they might be too out-of-place on an EM, assuming they're not white.